Andrew Williams

An absolute delight of a film. Beautifully (and no doubt expensively) crafted with plenty of Victorian detail which transports you back to those times. The script is full of what are probably accurate 19thC criminal slang words which help give the story a genuine appeal as a period piece. The gang is perfectly cast and they have to overcome so many seemingly impossible obstacles in achieving their goal, you can't help hoping they get away with it - rather as the crowd at the end does ! I love anything to do with railways in the days of steam so the train sequences are huge fun. To top it all Jerry Goldsmith's rumbustious score gallops along memorably too. I'm hearing it now as I type this.

as a Welshman living in South Wales - Carmarthenshire and not the Rhondda valley, all I can say is I'm heartily glad that Fox were unable to film in Wales itself. The Rhondda in 1940 was a bloody awful place. It's been cleaned up and all the slag has gone but I still wouldn't want to see a film made there. The fanciful, wildly inaccurate but very beautiful village they made in California is far more visually satisfying in the story telling. I don't even mind that there was only 1 Welshman in the cast. The Welsh accent does NOT travel well to my mind, unless you want to sound ridiculous. John Ford made a masterpiece of heart warming, heart wrenching beauty and I thank him and his cast from the bottom of my Welsh calon (heart)