Hope and Glory (film) - Critical Response

Critical Response

The film was favourably reviewed by critic Pauline Kael in her film reviews collection Hooked.

It's hard to believe that a great comedy could be made of the Blitz but John Boorman has done it. In his new, autobiographical film, he has had the inspiration to desentimentalise wartime England and show us the Second World War the way he saw it as an eight year old. The war frees the Rowans from the dismal monotony of their pinched white-collar lives. He doesn't deny the war its terrors. Yet he gives everything a comic fillip. That's the joy of the film: the war has its horrors, but it also destroys much of what the genteel poor like Grace Rowan (Sarah Miles), have barely been able to acknowledge they wanted destroyed. It's like a plainspoken, English variant of the Taviani brothers' The Night of the Shooting Stars.