For the first time in this series that has been going on since 2022 and has featured a scant half-dozen films in those nearly four years, I've gotten to a movie I didn't really know anything about before going in. I was familiar with the title Hope and Glory from hearing it mentioned here or there, but I didn't know who was in it, who directed it, or what it was about. (And even after watching it, I don't really know who was in it. The only actor I recognized from anything else was Ian Bannen, and I only know him from one of his final films, a one-time favorite of mine, Waking Ned Devine.)
As it turns out, John Boorman's film is a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of World War II in England.
That sounds like it has the potential to be very boring. Or at least, it might not be the kind of thing we see made much in 2026.
But I had a great time with this movie, which struck me as a cross between different sorts of movies that have worked well for me, at least in some cases. Its setting put me in mind of some of Terence Davies' films from this period, one I really like (Distant Voices, Still Lives) and one I don't care for as much (The Long Day Closes). However, in terms of its sense of making nostalgia fun rather than stuffy, it also reminded me of a family favorite that speaks to my dad's midwestern childhood, A Christmas Story, though Hope and Glory is surely not pitched at quite such a zany level, nor does it have as much narration, nor is it American in any sense.
The Christmas Story comp may be inexact, but I offer it to show you just how much I enjoyed myself while watching this movie that (like A Christmas Story) follows one family, in this case over most of the war as they evade bombings and play around in the rubble afterward.
The thing Boorman gets really right here, perhaps because this story is autobiographical, is what it would have been like to perceive the war from the perspective of a child, who isn't capable of comprehending just how serious its impacts were. This child and his friends are more likely to want to smash the remaining intact parts of decimated homes -- in a gleeful rather than an aggressive manner -- than contemplate the loss around them.
One perfect example of this is when a neighborhood girl, who appears to be around 13 or 14, loses her mother in a bombing, and is standing there looking sort of shell-shocked and vaguely miserable, yet still mostly composed, in among the rubble. There's this one boy running around telling all the other children, in the same tone he'd use if he just saw a UFO land on the lawn, that the girl's mother got killed last night. He's so excited to be the messenger that he has to tell every child he sees, and when they don't believe him, he invites them to go ask the girl. She confirms with sort of a sullen nod. As if this is not humiliating enough, and insensitive in a manner only a child could not comprehend, he then finds another disbelieving neighborhood child, and the whole embarrassing routine begins again.
This should be fodder for great sadness and misery. Instead, it is a matter-of-fact testament to the whole "Keep calm and carry on" mentality that Britain adopted during the war, which helped them get through the most trying of times.
The boy that's a stand-in for Boorman, Billy (Sebatian Rice-Edwards), is nominally the main character, as he's the one who would be coming of age. But the film is a lot more interested in the movements of his mother Grace (Sarah Miles, who resembles a proto Emily Watson) and his older sister Dawn (Sammi Davis), who is constantly misbehaving, which results in her falling for and getting impregnated by a Canandian soldier. The father, Clive (David Hayman), is also a central figure, but because he's an enlisted man, he's not always there.
I suppose I should give a little plot. Grace wants to send her two youngest away, Billy and his younger sister, but has a change of heart on the train platform where they are to leave to be sent off to Australia. So she pulls them back and in turns forces them to endure the bombings that periodically level homes in their neighborhood, a decision she greatly regrets, but which does not end in tragedy. In fact, one of the reasons the film is so "fun," if that's the right word, is that it isn't lulling us just so it can wallop us with the big death of the father, the mother or the sister. All of these characters survive the movie, and I guess that's a spoiler, but I seriously doubt you were just about to watch a best picture nominee from 39 years ago that was obscure enough that a cinephile like myself didn't really know much about it.
It may be obscure to me, but I bet this was pretty celebrated in England in the 1980s, and it was enough of an artisitic and commercial success -- or at least, Boorman had enough clout -- that a sequel called Queen and Country was made in 2014. I'll have to put that on my list as well.
It strikes me that the British film industry was really at the forefront during this era, as both the last film I watched in this series (1989's My Left Foot) and the next film I'll watch (1986's A Room With a View) are British, and I've already mentioned that Terence Davies was making celebrated films during this era. Of course, all of Merchant-Ivory's films, of which Room With a View is one, were from this part of the world. To be sure, the British film industry is not dead, but you don't see us talking about modern British films as big awards contenders the way we once did.
I could and probably should go on providing other examples of things that made me laugh or made me nod with a sense of absorbing their truth. One of those is a memorable sequence where the characters have sort of a dance with an out-of-control unmanned dirigible in their neighborhood, something that has to do with repelling the German attack.
But many of these examples I would hypothetically provide are "typical" coming-of-age stuff. That is hardly meant as a criticism, more as a sense of pleasant familiarity. You know, scenes set at the movie theater, scenes of young boys seeing girls in their undergarments, that sort of thing. It's all very sweet and enjoyable and packaged together marvelously by Boorman.
Besides, I'm not trying to meet a particular word count here -- just telling you I saw another movie in this periodic series that isn't progressing as quickly as it should.
After this year's Oscars, I will have, in all likelihood, a new Audient Bridesmaid that needs to be watched before I can continue with the series' core mandate, which is that I always watch the most recent unseen Bridesmaid next, and am obstructed from continuing back into the longer ago history until I do. That movie will be Marty Supreme, assuming it does not win best picture, which it won't.
But maybe I'll try to watch either one or two more before then. Not because it's really any different to be beholden to watch any one particular film over any other particular film. It's just that I seem to lose steam on this project as the year goes on, especially if I don't feel particularly motivated to catch up with the best picture nominee I only just missed from the most recent year. So, I may try to fit in A Room With a View before the end of the month, and see how that goes, and if goes well, maybe even one more.
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