Such a frustrating disappointment

People are voting emotionally.

The first must-see film of the year.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This film is a family for all the family. Yes you will find yourself reaching for the tissues quite a lot, but its all happy tears. My Daddy, My Daddy gets me every time. Anyone who can watch that without sobbing has no soul. This film is fantastic due to Bernard Cribbins being in this film with his character Mr Albert Perks. Wouldn't we all love to know a Mr Perks? He has so many scenes that make you smile and laugh at, his kindness and simple enjoyment of life. Of course his Birthday scenes, entering the home and saying 'Hello Woman!' to his wife is one of the best. I could go on and on about this film, it has so many parts I love. The scenery is stunning, not to sure about the earthquake trees sliding down the hill, but we'll over look that one! I dare you to watch it and not like it. I'm off to wave at trains and send my love...

Based on the book by Edith Nesbit & the directorial debut of Lionel Jeffries, "The Railway Children" is a movie of immense charm. After the arrest & imprisonment of their father on charges of spying, a middle-class mother, (played by Dinah Sheridan), & her three children are forced to move to humbler surroundings. The Waterbury family move to a cottage in the Yorkshire Dales close to a railway which the three children Bobbie (Jenny Agutter), Phyllis (Sally Thomsett) & Peter (Gary Warren) frequently visit most days. They befriend the local station porter Mr. Perks (Bernard Cribbins) & an "old gentleman" passenger (William Mervyn). The latter helps to secure the eventual release of the children's father from his incarceration. Towards the films end when the father (Iain Cuthbertson) travels to Yorkshire to be re-united with his family, we witness what is probably the most moving "tear-jerking" scene in movie history. His eldest daughter Bobbie awaits at the station uncertain as to what is about to happen. Her father alights from a train in thick smoke from the steam engine. As the smoke clears & Bobbie slowly realises who it is standing on the platform she runs toward him & shouts "Daddy, my daddy". I must have seen this scene 20 times & it still brings moisture to my eyes. Jenny Agutter many years later narrated a documentary on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway at Howarth in Yorkshire where the movie's railway scenes were filmed. We learnt from the people in charge of its preservation that this movie was the single biggest shot in the arm for tourism that it has ever had in its short history!.

During the Edwardian era Charles Waterbury, a senior official at the Foreign Office, is wrongly accused of selling state secrets to the Russians and imprisoned. His wife and three teenage children Roberta ("Bobbie"), Peter and Phyllis are forced to leave their luxurious London home and move to an old farmhouse in the Yorkshire countryside, where Mrs Waterbury supports the family by writing. Their new home is close to a railway, which plays an important part in the family's subsequent adventures. (I refer to Phyllis as a teenager, even though in the original book she was only 11, because here she is clearly intended to be older. Sally Thomsett, the actress who played her, was actually 20, three years older than Jenny Agutter and four older than Gary Warren who played Phyllis's supposedly older siblings). Even though her stories had been written some seventy years earlier, E. Nesbit was one of my favourite authors during my childhood. (The "E" stood for Edith; like J K Rowling she hid behind an initial because she feared that boys would not want to read books by a female author and that girls would not want to read her books if she adopted an explicitly male pseudonym). I loved her novel "The Railway Children" and was equally fond of the film which originally came out at around the same time (1970) as I was reading the book. I am not the only one to have enjoyed the film; it enjoys classic status in Britain and is sometimes even included in lists of the "greatest films ever made". I recently watched it again for the first time in many years, and was struck by how unlikely its basic premise is. The children know nothing of their father's plight until they accidentally come across a reference to his trial in an old newspaper; all they know is that he has "had to go away" somewhere. I would have thought that a real-life case of this nature would have caused a massive scandal, becoming a sort of British Dreyfus affair. If Mr Waterbury really had been guilty I could have understood his wife trying to shield his children from all knowledge of his disgrace, but as the charges against him are all completely false I would have thought that Mrs Waterbury, far from disappearing quietly up to Yorkshire, would have placed herself at the head of a vociferous campaign to vindicate her husband's innocence and secure his freedom. Moreover, there is far too much coincidence involved; a boy whom the children rescue after he injures himself during a paper-chase turns out to be the grandson of the Old Gentleman whom they have already befriended, who in turn proves to be the one man with the evidence to free their father. I would not, however, allow considerations like these to affect my enjoyment of the film too much. It was, after all, originally aimed at children, and children tend to be more tolerant than adults when it to plot holes and inconsistencies of this nature. There is, however, also plenty for adults to enjoy. For lovers of the countryside there is director Lionel Jeffries' photography of the magnificent scenery; although I am a proud Man of Kent I can well understand why Yorkshire folk refer to their native land as "God's Own County". For railway buffs there are the old steam trains, here painted in various liveries and attributed to the fictional 'Great Northern and Southern Railway'. (This was presumably done to head off any criticism; railway enthusiasts are notoriously sharp-eyed and would doubtless have seized on any errors had the producers attempted to feature a real railway company). Among the actors, the ones who really stood out for me were Bernard Cribbins as the eccentric but kindly station porter Albert Perks, a good friend of the children, and the lovely Jenny Agutter as Bobbie. Agutter, of course, went on to have a successful film career, but her two young co-stars do not seem to have been so fortunate. Thomsett's fortunes went into something of a decline after the television sit-com "Man about the House" in which she starred, came to an end. Warren was one of the leading British teenage stars of the early seventies, but after starring in television series like "Catweazle", "Alexander the Greatest" and "Whacko" seems to have given up acting for good. Despite my youthful enthusiasm, I am not sure that "The Railway Children" really belongs in the "greatest ever" category, but it was certainly a critical and commercial success at the time of its release and has remained popular ever since, helped by the fact that it is regularly shown on television. It can be seen as superior family entertainment, a children's version of the familiar "heritage cinema" style of film- making. 8/10

I think together all the reviewers have captured this film really well. I have seen it many, many times, but I still feel a sense of joy and warmth just as I did the first time. My emotional response to this film never seems to fade. The final scene certainly brings me to tears, but so does the scene between Perks and The Children on his birthday. And as for the Kindly Gentleman. Something else is going on with that character. The generous provider and solver of problems. He knows everything about everything and has connections everywhere. A perfect father to run to and make us feel safe. I do not know how the film does it, but it touches something very English deep inside, which has long gone from our daily experience, but yet we all instantly recognise and yearn for again.