John Boorman remembers World War II from the perspective of being a child during the Blitz. While his experiences during World War II are not unique, the film he made based on those experiences is. Hope and Glory may not be the only film to look at World War II from the home-front side of things, but the way it does it is utterly unique, telling a story primarily from the perspective of the youngest boy in a typical British family. Most of what we see is filtered through that perspective rather than the far more complicated perspectives of the adults. John has clearly not forgotten what it was like to be a child during these dark times and has imbued this sense of wonder, innocence, and often cringy humor into his film. Not everyone got this film when it released, but those who did championed it, pushing it in amongst the five Best Picture nominations for the year 1987.
We live in a time when the generation that experienced these events has mostly died out, and we no longer have first-person accounts we can go to for these kinds of stories. That alone makes a film like this all the more special, because it comes from that kind of first-person account. John Boorman is telling us about his own childhood, presenting us with a semi-biographical picture of his youth. The things we are seeing on screen are things he either experienced himself or supposedly knew someone who did. Life didn’t stop because the world was at war, and the children didn’t cease being children because the bombs were dropping.
The film opens on the day Britain declared war on Germany. Our main focus for these events is the Rohan family (Billy (Sebastian Rice-Edwards), his sisters Sue (Geraldine Muir) and Dawn (Sammi Davis), and his parents Grace (Sarah Miles) and Clive (David Hayman)), who live in a London suburb. Against the wishes of his wife, Clive joins the army, believing the war will be over in a matter of months, and leaves her behind to watch over the children. She almost sends them away, but changes her mind at the train station and pulls them back, knowing that she cannot bear to be apart from them.
In the eyes of a child, the “fireworks” provided by the Blitz every night are equally exciting and terrifying. Likewise, the ruins in the city are a fertile playing ground for the young kids in the suburbs who go largely unsupervised and often find dangerous items amongst the rubble in which they play. On top of that, Billy’s older sister has fallen for a Canadian soldier, and the boys catch her having sex on a number of occasions. Eventually, she gets pregnant and, finding that her life has gotten topsy-turvy, discovers the value of her family as they help her through these difficult times.
A fire burns down the Rohan home, forcing them to move in with Grace’s parents for a while. This gives Billy the opportunity to spend more time with his grumpy old grandfather, who teaches him how to fish. Time passes by, Dawn gets married and has her baby, and Billy eventually is sent back to school, only to celebrate, along with the rest of the kids, when a bombing destroys the school building.
John Boorman clearly remembers what it was like to be a young adolescent boy. He is channeling the innocent and naive worldview into the character of Billy. But he is also ramping things up a bit, exaggerating things, or at the very least imagining things more vividly than they probably really were. Billy is exposed to sex far too early than he should, both through spying on his sister and her lover or paying a young girl in the neighborhood to allow him and the rest of the boys to look down the front of her underpants. These moments feel cringy and uncomfortable to watch while at the same time we are laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, especially since the young girl in question is in on the events and smacks the heads of the boys if they stare for too long.
The same absurdity can be said for an earlier scene when Billy and his friends are playing war games. At one point a boy clamps a live bullet into a vice clamp and acts like he is going to hammer the firing pin while a boy, playing POW, is held in front of it. The firing pin is eventually struck and the round ricochets around this group of boys who all start pretending to be shot. This is beyond the naivety of youth and well into the realm of stupidity. As a child I played with tiny blasting caps, hammering them on the concrete to get the expected loud bang and flash. It scorched the pavement and made a loud noise but nothing more. I knew no one who would intentionally strike the firing pin of a rifle bullet. Perhaps Boorman did and I’m just using my personal experience to color my perceptions but these moments were when the film didn’t quite ring true.
There isn’t much of a plot to this film, although things do happen. We used to call these kinds of films Slice of Life movies because they were more about the moment and the emotions than they were about an overall narrative. At the time, it seemed like it shouldn’t be possible to make a comedy picture based around the war, yet we had been seeing just such things since the very beginning. Charlie Chaplin famously lampooned Adolph Hitler in The Great Dictator, playing up the stupidity of fascism while not losing track of the human element. Much later, another comedic director, Taika Waititi, would lampoon Hitler again while also looking at the war from a child’s point of view. It’s human nature to find comedy in the tragic, to ease the suffering through laughter. The best filmmakers cut through what could be dark and depressing by focusing on the absurd, like the boys finding fascination in the fact that one of the neighbor girls has just lost her mother in the bombings, even going right up to her on the street to confirm that information, unmindful that she is probably devastated by the loss.
Hope and Glory skirts the line between absurdist humor and genuine scares. At one point, we see the front of the Rohan family home blown in by a bomb, played in slow motion so that we can see the impact of the shockwave on Grace and her kids’ faces. The youngest daughter is injured in that blast, and the mother makes a vocal plea to God to take her instead. This is played against the elder daughter’s refusal to get out of bed and join the family in the bomb shelter, then complaining that they left her behind to die. It’s absurd, but it is also something we could see happening in our own families were we in this situation.
While this film is tonally all over the place, somehow it works. John Boorman has crafted a film that manages to corral all of these things into a coherent narrative that is cacophonous, yet cognitive. It’s silly, scary, and heartfelt all at the same time. These elements shouldn’t jive, but his skillful hands guide us through it all so that, even when we question the reality of the events, we don’t question the sincerity. Many years later, he revisited this film in a sequel entitled Queen and Country. This sequel isn’t nearly as beloved, and none of the primary cast returned for it. It’s a film that didn’t really need to exist and doesn’t add anything meaningful to the narrative. Hope and Glory isn’t a perfect film, but it gives us all that we need for a satisfying film, including the pure joy of the young over their school being destroyed. Many of us were fantasizing about just such an event, not knowing the true horrors that lead up to something like this coming to pass. It’s just the right note to end such a film and the perfect epilogue to the events proceeding it.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: John Boorman
Best Director: John Boorman
Best Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen: John Boorman
Best Art Direction: Anthony D. G. Pratt and Joanne Woollard
Best Cinematography: Philippe Rousselot
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Release Date: October 16, 1987
Running Time: 113 Minutes
Rated PG-13
Starring: Sarah Miles, David Hayman, Derrick O’Connor, Susan Wooldridge, Sammi Davis, Ian Bannen, and Sebastian Rice-Edwards
Directed by: John Boorman
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