Tawny Pipit

A film that I have only recently discovered. I taped it late one night and copied in onto another tape cutting out the adverts. What a marvelous little film this is with the subliminal message that nobody is going to change the English village way of life. I made a point of visiting Lower Slaughter yesterday and the village is identical to how it was 62 years ago. The mill wheel and the bridge behind it remain the same, great film, great location and a marvelous slice of social and cinema history. I am sure that I saw a Tawny pipit in the distance.Unlike the Titfield Thunderbolt which shows an England that does not exist anymore this great film shows locations that remain the same to this day.

Tawny Pipit was filmed in and around Bourton-on-the-Water, in Gloucestershire. I know this because my mother is one of the children, front and center, in the church choir scene. She was one of those children evacuated from London, and living with her grandparents during the war. I have been searching the world for a copy of this on video, but apparently it has never been been released to video. I sure wish it was. My mother is now 65, and would love to possess it as a memento of her childhood.

I have seen this film a few times over the years on TV and the best thing I liked about it is the pub scene where the man from Suffolk berates the people in the pub from Norfolk for being slow to act and refers to a time in the history when Suffolk were fighting an enemy while Norfolk people were still talking about doing something.this type of thing was quite common in England in the past and you were branded what type of person you were from where you lived in England and no doubt Ireland Scotland USA etc.

When convalescing RAF pilot Niall MacGinnis and his nurse, Rosamund John, are out bird watching in rural Gloucestershire, they spot a Tawny Pipit -- not just one, but only the second nesting pair in English history. They rouse the entire village to protect these visitors in a wartime paean to British kindliness and back-country values.

Bernard Miles and Charles Saunders co-direct from a script of their own devising. Miles also acts in heavy make up as a wheel-chair bound military man. It's a well-told story, but very heavy-handed in its subtextual message, as the local Church choir sings a composition about the birds, and later regales a visiting Soviet sniper with "The Internationale", in a sequence in which Miles gives her his old machine gun and Land Girl Jean Gillie wonders if she would be as good a shot were the old Land of Hope and Glory invaded.

I can't help but compare this to the sort of movie that Ealing would become famous for; this comes off as beating the matter to death, with few of the oddly endearing eccentrics that Ealing would use to make its central theme clear. Still, it's very watchable throughout with some good performances.

The film was largely shot in Lower Slaughter and is a fascinating historical record of the Cotswolds during WW2. Today Lower Slaughter is a much visited village; the buildings are largely unchanged and the mill wheel still turns, if only for show. In "An eye for a Bird" 1970 Eric Hosking, who was the ornithological advisor for the film wrote : "It was decided that it was quite impossible to contemplate filming an actual tawny pipit; it nests mainly on the Continent where the war was raging. It was decided to photograph a pair of ordinary meadow pipits and keep to shots which showed the back view only; the tawny has a plain breast and the meadow a speckled one, but their back plumage is very similar."