Child's Play

There's a bit of satire about atomic research and the official secrets in CHILD'S PLAY, but it's mostly about a gang of kids in a small English village who invent atomic popcorn. It has a silly and confusing air, told as it is, by the leader of the gang, Christopher Beeny, and there's a rough attempt to emulate Hal Roach's Our Gang series in post-war Britain. However, despite some silly moments and a fine, mildly daft performance by Mona Washbourne as the children's collaborator and saleswoman, it is far too scattered to ever quite gel into something.

The director is Margaret Thomson, a lady who began her career directing informational shorts for the Department of Agriculture, and who later became a specialist in writing and directing children's movies. A couple of later credits as "children's coach" in movies like THE LITTLE KIDNAPPERS indicate that she was good at getting performances out of the young 'uns. While Master Beeny has had a good career, and Anneke Willis also -- she had a good run as a companion on DOCTOR WHO -- most of the children's careers seems to have been limited to this one movie.

The sort of film that would be shown at children's matinees on Saturday.It is actually quite entertaining.The director has manage to obtain good performances from the children.

A fantasy/sci-fi film and who would not have wanted to be in a gang like this in the 1950s in the UK, I certainly would have, I was in a gang of sorts but we didn't have a gang but hut or exciting adventures like this lot.

The vivid imagination of the main boy character in central to the film and all of the child actors are great even the very young girl.

This must have been very appealing to a young audience in 1954 but I failed to achieve as much as they did here with my chemistry set, purple fingers from potassium permanganate was my best effort.

Worth being recommended to youngster now to see what they missed out on as they now spend most of their time doing dumb things with a smart phone.

Both a charmingly old-fashioned period piece with a game cast (including two child actors - Christopher Beeny and Anneke Wills - who later had adult careers) beautifully shot on location by Denny Densham in the English countryside, and an extraordinary relic of the period between 'Seven Days to Noon' (and released the year the British government started work on building it's own H-Bomb) and the formation of the CND, with Atom Bombs treated as exciting toys rather than harbingers of the end of the world.

Anybody who thinks the British public were unaware of the Atomic Bomb will find themselves partially disabused of that idea by this extraordinary Group Three production directed by a woman in which the kids talk about little else without having the first notion of how destructive Atom Bombs actually were, or how dangerous radiation really was; and used a piece of rock from Krakatoa to build their bomb the way Dan O'Herlihy employed slivers from Stonehenge thirty years later to slaughter the youth of America in 'Season of the Witch'.

Lovely piece of nostalgia. Child's play depicts a Britain of long summers and cricket on the village green. If only kids were like this today, if only Britain was like this.

Highly recommended for its innocence