Whistle Down the Wind (UK 1961)

With all the crap available on DVD and streaming video, it comes as a surprise when you can't find something that was good or widely considered to be good.

I looked for Whistle Down the Wind. I don't remember how it came to mind. It starred Haley Mills, Alan Bates and Bernard Lee. Haley Mills finds a bearded man hiding out in her family's barn and for various reasons thinks it's Jesus Christ. He makes her promise not to tell anyone he's there. She tried to keep in secret but after a while the local children all find out.

They used to show high brow movies on the PBS station every day at one PM, and I'd usually watch them over the summer when I was out of school, and that was one of the movies they'd show every year. I never sat through the whole thing. I remember it being somewhat realistic, the guy in it not being much of a Christ figure.

The movie was based on a novel which was written a few years earlier by Haley Mills' mother. The children in the story were based on her own children including Haley. So she was playing a character based on herself.

There are adults who find this sort of thing touching, and I do, too, to some degree. Because of that, I'm resistant to it. There was The Littlest Angel which starts with a child dying a horrible death. He goes to heaven where the dead become angels, and the angels were given orders to have a present for Jesus on the occasion of his birth. The littlest angel gives Him some crap he saved when he was alive---whatever kind of stuff an 8-year-old in the Bible days would save. A feather and maybe a rock.

I looked The Littlest Angel up on line a few years ago and read a comment from a father whose children couldn't understand why he couldn't read the story without crying.

They took it too far with the Little Drummer Boy. He had no gift to bring so he entertains a newborn by banging on a drum.

I've never sat through the whole movie, Whistle Down the Wind. I saw bits of it on TV years ago, I've read about it over the years and I watched some clips on YouTube.

The kids had some kittens in the barn. They expected Jesus to take care of them, but He lets one of them die.

Haley Mills go to the vicar and asks him why Jesus would let a kitten die. She was asking a reasonable question under the circumstances. Essentially, Is Jesus some kind of idiot who can't take care of a cat? Either the guy isn't Jesus or Jesus isn't all He's cracked up to be. But the vicar takes is as a theological question. It might have been a funny scene if it didn't involve a child and her dead kitten.