Hope and Glory

It's a rich, funny, bracing film, one of Boorman's finest.[06 Nov 1987, p.41]

Hope and Glory is a wonderful film, an intelligent, heartfelt, personal, and marvelously entertaining look at what it was like to grow up in wartorn England.

Boorman's autobiographical film about family life during the Blitz is subversively light on the blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice, and a joy throughout.

John Boorman's childhood and the London Blitz happened to coincide. Which is great for the movie Hope and Glory, because he turns both events into exquisite myth.

Turning the pious cliches of World War II melodrama on their heads, Boorman has made his most dizzyingly funny movie, an anarchic celebration of family. The warmth that exudes from these turbulent recollections isn't a sentimental heat but a joyful one: Boorman's eyes see the foibles and betrayals of adult life, the casual savagery of children, and forgive all. It's an idyll set amidst urban rubble. [19 Oct 1987, p.84]

There is something almost perverse in the way Boorman defines his point of view. He is not concerned in this film about the tragedy of war, or the meaning of war, but only with the specific experience of war for a grade-school boy. Drawing from his autobiographical memories, he has not given the little boy in the movie any more insights than such a little boy should have.

Appealing, emotional and with a strong enough performance by Rice-Edwards as the boy in his own little war-free world.