Whistle Down the Wind (1961)

I first saw this at the Saturday Morning Pictures (cinema for kids) and have always loved it. The loss of innocence in this story is heartbreaking but the character of her brother is hilarious to the very end. 

I've been looking for this movie on DVD for decades. WHY isn't it available? I think it's transcendent.

Count me in as another fan of this movie!!
Here is a review that I once wrote
I thought I had posted it on IMDb but I hadn't:

Whistle Down the Wind (1961) / Bryan Forbes
As this black-and-white film opens, we see children playing in a farm field in the wintertime. They see a man throwing a gunnysack in the river. As they take the sack out, it is full of kittens that were to be drowned. As the children run home with the rescued kittens hidden in their bulky coats, they pass through the town square where a Salvation Army is assembled and performing. One of children asks a lady from the Salvation Army to take care of the kittens. She says she can’t because she has no place to keep them but explains that gentle Jesus will take care of them as she gives them a picture of Jesus. When they get home, they place the kittens in the barn and find a strange man (Alan Bates), sleeping there. The man looks a bit like Jesus—without the dress—so they assume he is Jesus dressed up to look modern. Having faith that Jesus would take care of the kittens, the children leave them with the man and go to the house.

The children’s father, Mr. Bostock (Bernard Lee, who played the chief villian in early Bond movies, i.e., M in Goldfinger) is the widowed owner of the farm and his gruff sister takes care of the children and household. The eldest of the children is Kathy Bostock (Hayley Mills, who was 15 at the time the film was made).

The children say nothing about the kittens or the man in the barn (Jesus), since they fear that the adults might kill Jesus again (as they had done in the Bible). We soon learn that the man is being sought as a murder suspect. The adults (and law authorities) don’t want to scare the children, and the children want to keep gentle Jesus safe from the adults…

This film that views the world from a child’s level, is simple but effective. Hayley Mills, who does a commentary track for the DVD, says that Alan Bates played ‘the man’ perfectly: he was neither too scary nor too kind to the children. By leaving the nature of his role open to interpretation, he helped the children play out their roles more naturally. Also, Bryan Forbes and Richard Attenborough (both of whom had their children in the final scene) often captured the naturalness of the younger children by photographing group shots when they didn’t know they were being filmed. [8/10]



I have the DVD (my DVDs are not organized, but I have an alphabetical list of them). I believe that it is only in the PAL format. As I was viewing all of the BFI Top 100, I found I had to have an all region DVD player, so bought one at that time.