Edwardian Elegy

By JAY COCKS

Too often, children's movies are a chore for parents, a bore for kids. The Railway Children offers so many quiet pleasures, however, that not only will the kids be enchanted but their elders might even want to sneak off and see it on their own.

The family in which Bobbie (Jenny Agutter), Phyllis (Sally Thomsett) and Peter (Gary Warren) grow up is nearly perfect. Mother (Dinah Sheridan) is impish and radiant, Father (Iain Cuthbertson) steadfast and affectionate. They all share the joys of Edwardian London, generous' Christmases and outings to the theater. But one evening two strange men appear and call Father away. "Some dire calamity is happening," says Bobbie, "I just know it." Indeed, Father does not return, and Mother tells the children that they will have to "play at being poor."

They move to a large, tumble-down cottage in Yorkshire, where the children encounter all manner of strange people and wonderful adventures. A stationmaster named Perks (Bernard Cribbins) answers their questions about trains. An elderly passenger (William Mervyn) waves at them from the dining-car window and eventually befriends them. A sickly man babbling Russian arrives one day, and the family takes him in. The movie does sometimes go sentimental, but mostly in a subdued, funny way, as when Peter's sisters catch him snitching coal for their cottage and he protests "It wasn't stealing. It was mining."

With all its closely observed details of Edwardian life, The Railway Children is an elegy for an era. Gas furnaces, bell boards in the kitchen, paper chases, old toys, carriages and capes, those beguiling trains--all conjure up a time of seeming innocence when unhappy endings were punishable by law. The matter of Father's mysterious disappearance is of course eventually cleared up.

The children, like so many young British performers, possess the happy talent of being engaging but never cloying, while the adult actors perform with the right kind of storybook flair.

The film was adapted by Actor Lionel Jeffries from E. Nesbit's 1906 children's book. It is Jeffries' first try at directing, and it has about it an entirely captivating air of elegance and restraint.

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