THE RAILWAY CHILDREN (1970) ***1/2 What a great film about good children. Films don't celebrate good children enough. Because it's very hard for the semi-talented to do without getting sappy or schmaltzy. Lionel Jefferies doesn't have any difficulty at all in working E. Nesbit's beautiful children's story. It helps to have actors. Jenny Agutter is absolutely perfect, a great daughter and even better big sister. She's about as good as a kid can get, outside of real life. Mama Dinah Sheridan gets across love and pain without excess or any small amount of perfectly stifled emotion. There's not a false twist of lip or grimace in the entire film. Sally Thomsett and Gary Warren are also wonderful children, there's not a bad cast on the ticket. England is shot in the mood of the film, gray but with a hopeful breeze and a new train comin' down the line, at regular intervals but maybe not when you always expect it. The pace is smooth, gently humorous, even tempered, ultimately enchanting. This, my friends, is not mere sentimentality, this is pathos. Good things happen to good kids, just not all the time.
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