The Man from Nowhere

Seemingly influenced by THE AMAZING MR BLUNDEN, THE MAN FROM NOWHERE is a charming little ghost story that comes to us courtesy of the Children's Film Foundation. It's beautifully shot in some beautiful surroundings and the youthful cast members are charmingly portrayed. As it turns out, the mystery of the actual plot is basic and quite repetitive at times, but the whole thing is so nice to look at that I didn't mind at all.

The Children's Film Foundation's answer to 'The Amazing Mr Blunden' is the usual malarkey about a gang of kids encountering a pair of crooks transposed to rural Berkshire in 1860. It has a twee score by John Cameron, but some of the atmosphere of 'The Innocents' and 'The Haunting' (with Ronald Adam returning from the latter).

This features quite a charming effort from the young Sarah Hollis Andrews as "Alice", an orphan who goes to live with her uncle "George" (Ronald Adam). Once at his spooky old home, she starts to see a spectre that appears, then disappears. What's going on? The film has something of an episode of "Scooby Do" to it - it becomes fairly clear to us early early on what is going on, though quite how these apparitions are being manifested is quite intriguing. The Children's Film Foundation in the UK made many of these mid-budget stories that amiably showcased the talents of young actors, usually with one or two established character actors to stabilise the rougher edges of their performances. In this case, the whole things glides along well for an hour, and is an easy film to watch.

This film from the Children's Film Foundation was made for Saturday morning minors clubs.This film ticks the boxes of what you could expect from one of these films and remains very watchable

Nice to see that the BFI have released a decent copy of this on R2 DVD, along with two other spooky stories from the Children's Film Foundation. If I can get the negatives out of the way, CFF films obviously focused on kids and it's rare for a film of this ilk to have loads of top talent available as far as child actors are concerned. Clearly these films had little in the way of budget too. The good news is that these particular kids are, at the very least, a pleasant bunch and so the variable acting skills are easily forgiven - and there's good adult support from the likes of Ronald Adam and John Fforbes-Robertson (Dracula in hammers 'Legend of the 7 golden Vampires'. Regarding the budget, full marks to the crew for finding some great atmospheric locations - a fine looking period house, a station with a working steam train and perfect woodland. It all helps to make it look more expensive than it was. As for the story, well, it's very simple and this is a lesson for the modern film makers. Complicated doesn't mean good, necessarily. And simple doesn't mean bad. It's a fine line between genre iconography and cliché. Sometimes, when we want to watch a spooky story in an old dark house, the expected tropes are exactly what we seek. In this case, an orphaned young girl is sent to stay with her poorly Uncle but is immediately set upon by a frightening figure in black who warns her to leave the house. The figure always seems to vanish into 'nowhere'. Who is trying to scare the girl away and why? I dare say that you'll guess the answer well before the end (which is under an hour) but it really won't matter. Lesson 2 for modern film makers. You don't have to rely on lazy, mechanical editing of sudden moves and loud noises. That isn't scary anyway, just makes you jump. In this quaint old kids film, what happens is presented simply. The noises are not violently jarring, there are no special effects. But it manages to be a 100 times more atmospheric. If you're unable to view an old film within context, then you'll be disappointed. However, with the right frame of mind you may well feel that this short tale is a nostalgic treat, an uncovered treasure...and a clear lesson for the depressingly talentless laziness of the modern ghost story film maker.