(If you haven't seen it.) Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills is a mini-film made for tv, made in 1979, seven of the best character actors of the time playing children who are being nasty in the woods amongst the fears and bravado of WW2. Unique, brilliant, and just a little disturbing.
If you must tell someone about a film, then perhaps say something original? No tedious 'saying of the plot'?
I saw Blue Remembered Hills in 1979 and the moment that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, was right at the end, the Housman. Dennis Potter in voiceover reading the Housman over the children each sobbing in separate patches of the crop-field. Did you have the same feeling? Dennis Potter making his audience sit up. This work had earned a gravitas, and you were going to get told so. That disembodied voiceover is an astonishing touch. I hate using the word 'irony' for it is the most misused word in the language, so much so that I've lost confidence in its several acceptable contexts. All I can do is ask whether 'irony' is the correct word to describe how the words of Housman are used -
What spires, what forms are those?"
"The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again."
The happy highways where I went/And cannot come again? On the contrary - Potter is saying in his Blue Remembered Hills - those highways, unfortunately, are with you always.
Having adults play children in Blue Remembered Hills - the thing that it's famous for - revealed things about children that they themselves could never have 'got across' didn't it? Due in no small part to the exceptional actors, 'childhood' is writ large both literally (adult-sized kids) and behaviourally (actor's hyper-realism). From the off, an audience might feel that these children are more like children than children themselves surely.
It's a little shocking, isn't it, when you fancy you can see the adult in the child? You look at these 'children' in Blue Remembered Hills and easily fancy you see the adults they will become. And it 'fits' doesn't it. For in Potter's view, children's behaviour is very close to adult's behaviour. The 'how' of what an adult does is different to that of a child, for more circuitry is in place: but much of the 'what' that an adult does differs very little from that of a child. The detail of how a child bullies is different to how an adult bullies. Most grown-ups don't dribble spit onto the face of someone they hold down. But the act of bullying is there in both child and adult. The tedious kid who has to create a hierarchy and has to be seen to be above others in that created hierarchy ("I be number two though!") else his existence is almost meaningless, that child is the equally boring adult who has to do the same. The entitled girl that will only kiss (her individual concept of) what is alpha, is there at 7 yrs old and at 97 yrs old. "We (being the alpha kid 'Wallace' and I) be goan ta get married, with a ring and all."
"Who be I then? Tell me that?" asks Audrey in Blue Remembered Hills. She is a child and thinks she can play-act and choose whom to become. Potter is possibly saying that, by and large, you can't. You can't become much at all because, even as a child, you are already roughly formed. Children are not sweet. And they are certainly not innocent. Possibly you have forgotten what it was like when you were a child, what went on, and what you were thinking.
And it works the other way around doesn't it? Looking at these actors it is easy to fancy that you see the children they used to be.
Isn't the device in the final scenes of Blue Remembered Hills, just before the soft regret of Housman, so very telling? The six remaining kids have committed manslaughter and they've fled to the crop field. They throw themselves down. They try to get their stories straight: they must not get found out. But they've thrown themselves down in a particular fashion. They are not together in a big group, rather are they isolated, each child in its own little crop clearing. They can't see one another. Each child is individually guilty. Left to its own thoughts on its own. And then of course, there is the question of whether each one of them can trust the others with the silence. Just like in grown-up world.
And the greatest frame in Blue Remembered Hills? Somewhere in the sequence in which Janine Duvitski and Helen Mirren push a lumbering pram up a grassy slope. But Colin Jeavons rocking himself violently in the hay-barn and chanting "come back dad" must come a close second.
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