Film Review: The Railway Children Return brings the nostalgia - but falls short
The Railway Children Return for declan burke caroline delaney
There’s a semantic debate to be had about (PG) — only one of the original children, Bobbie Waterbury, returns, and by now (1944) she’s a grandmother. The good news is that Bobbie is still played by Jenny Agutter, and that Bobbie remembers her own harrowing experience of being uprooted from her home and plonked down in a rural idyll.
So when three ‘slum kids’ — Lily (Beau Gadson), Pattie (Eden Hamilton) and Ted (Zac Cudby) — arrive in the Yorkshire village of Oakworth from bomb-devastated Manchester, Bobbie is on hand to persuade her daughter, local headmistress Annie (Jessica Bagelow), to take in all three siblings.
A happy ending beckons, but then the young trio stumble across an American soldier, Abe (Kenneth Aikens), who has gone AWOL from his unit due to the brutalising racist abuse dished out by his superiors, and gone into hiding in an abandoned railway siding …
Written by Jemma Rodgers and Daniel Brocklehurst, and directed by Morgan Matthews, The attempts to recreate the charming world of the original film but succeeds only fitfully.
Beau Gadson is a likeably irreverent presence in the lead role, an impish artful dodger who employs the survival instincts honed on the Manchester streets to protect her younger siblings from the bullying of some intolerant locals.
Less persuasive is the sub-plot in which Lily and her siblings help Abe: while the storyline is agreeably abrasive in the context of the nostalgia-fest, it all feels a little contrived, and particularly when it comes to its resolution.
Jenny Agutter and Tom Courtenay provide some heft in the supporting roles, although Neil Hurst, playing the comically self-important station porter, nabs most of the best lines.
(cinema release)
