Robert Forrest

I saw this film when I was about ten when we lived in a rural valley in Australia. At the time i identified with Roddy MacDowell as representative of the innocence of the people of the valley and their privations with the coming of coal mines. It could have been made too about the expropriation of a Welsh valley for a reservoir. To be be honest this film choked me up completely in a way reminiscent of my reaction to Maxim Gorky's My Childhood. It seems to me that for young children in particular this film will never date.