The Railway Children Return

Director: Morgan Matthews
Starring: Jenny Agutter, Sheridan Smith, Tom Courtenay, Beau Gadsdon, Hugh Quarshie, John Bradley, Austin Haynes, Jessica Baglow, KJ Aikens, Eden Hamilton, Zac Cudby
Distributor: StudioCanal
Runtime: 95 mins. Reviewed in Sep 2022
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc

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Rating notes: Mild themes and violence

It’s 1944 and as life in Britain’s cities becomes increasingly perilous, three evacuee children are sent by their mother from Salford to the Yorkshire village of Oakworth. There they discover a young American soldier who, like them, is a long way from home.

September 2022 saw unprecedented manifestations of British nostalgia at the death of Queen Elizabeth II. While The Railway Children Return was made well in advance of the Queen’s death, it was fitting the movie, itself an updating of a previously beloved movie and book, was released in September.

The popular 1970 movie The Railway Children, based on characters by E Nesbit was set in Edwardian England, when the three Waterbury children and their mother move to Yorkshire when their father is wrongly imprisoned. In The Railway Children Return the action takes place in 1944, and once again three city children are sent to the Yorkshire countryside to remove them from the dangers of the war-torn cities.

Here is Jenny Agutter again, 50 years later, taking up her character from the earlier film. However, the strong Agutter-kind of teenage heroine now is played by Gadsdon, leaving her war-widowed mother in Salford, guiding her brother and sister to Oakworth, being taken in by the local schoolmistress, Sheridan Smith, and made to feel at home – despite some rather mean-minded local boys scoffing and throwing stones at the refugees from the cities.

So far so nostalgic. However, there is a brief initial indication of something else. MPs raid a local restaurant attacking the African-American GIs. And, suddenly, this becomes a key issue of the film, a young man racially bullied, having joined up to follow his brother’s patriotic footsteps, now wanting to get away from the war within the American troops. He is discovered by the children – and various adventures follow, helping him, hiding him, trying to get him on a train to Liverpool, running foul of the military authorities.

This seem to be a good idea for the plot of the film – but many of the comments on the IMDb condemn this, upbraiding the makers for inserting these themes into such a lovely nostalgic story, and introducing that contemporary condemnatory word, that this theme is ‘woke’.

Woke or not, we remember that the Americans were ‘over there’, that they were welcomed by the British, that many marriages ensued. And, we remember, the black lives mattered then.

So, 21st-century writers have taken up the original characters and invented this story. Why not? (This reviewer watched the film at a Saturday 2pmsession, not a big audience, no children, but, in fact, most of the audience were at the age of children of those 1944 railway children.)