The Railway Children (1970, G)

Dir: Lionel Jeffries, UK, 110mins, 35mm

When their Edwardian civil servant father is arrested on a charge of treason, three children are spirited away from London to genteel poverty and 'playing at being poor for a while’ in a Yorkshire country cottage. Their new lives there are governed by the passing of the local train down the bottom of the garden, and its entrée into different communities, values and hopes. This most celebrated work from perennial British character-actor Lionel Jefferies’ sees him in the unlikely role as a subtle and sweet children’s film director. The Railway Children remains richly treasured as an evocative keepsake of Edwardian nostalgia and EB Nesbitt’s original novel.

Courtesy of the British Film Institute.