Rereleased as a curtain-raiser for a sequel, Jenny Agutter, Bernard Cribbins and co continue to exert their grip over the national imagination
There can’t be many classic British family movies which feature Russian anti-tsarist writers exiled in Yorkshire. The Railway Children from 1970 is now re-released, as a curtain-raiser to a forthcoming sequel, The Railway Children Return, which will be set 40 years on and features Jenny Agutter playing a grownup version of her original character.
The original is robustly and adroitly directed by Lionel Jeffries, who also adapted the Edith Nesbit novel and it continues to exert its grip on our collective teatime imagination, due to its unworldly sweetness and gentleness and its forthright sense of decency – especially, maybe, that final scene where the children’s wrongly imprisoned father emerges from the steam on the railway platform, a moment as dramatic and mysterious as Omar Sharif galloping through the heat-haze in Lawrence of Arabia, to Jenny Agutter’s breathy delight: “Oh my daddy!”
Iain Cuthbertson is Charles Waterbury, the good-natured civil servant and genial paterfamilias who lives in upper-middle-class contentment in the London suburbs with his wife (Dinah Sheridan) and three children: Bobbie, played by Jenny Agutter, younger sister Phyllis, pertly played by the 20-year-old Sally Thomsett – the most glorious juve lead in British cinema history – and kid brother Peter, played by Gary Warren. When Charles is wrongly arrested and imprisoned for selling state secrets, the children and their mother have to move to a modest Yorkshire cottage where the mother apparently supports them by selling stories to London magazines – when one gets published they can have buns for tea. Freelance writers got paid quickly in those days.
