Whistle Down the Wind starring Hayley Mills and Alan Bates is one of my favourite films from the 1960s.

But it wasn’t until I did some research before a press conference for Hayley and Juliet Mills here to tour a play, Legends, that I realised that it was their mother, Mary Hayley Bell (Lady Mary Mills), who wrote the novel which the 1961 film was based on.

The story is about a young girl who finds a fugitive hiding in the family’s barn and thinks he is Jesus Christ.

“Blakey” is wanted for murder and the police are searching for him, but Kathy and the other children are determined to protect him.

There are many references to stories from the Bible in the film. In one scene, a child is mocked and beaten into denying he had seen Jesus. After the boy’s third denial, a train whistle is heard.

According to Wikipedia (I make no apologies):  “The strains of ‘We three kings’ can be discerned in the score as Kathy, her brother and sister march with the food ‘gifts’ they have acquired for the man in the ‘stable’. They are spotted and followed by a group of country children (shepherds). The early core of children who are in on the secret number a dozen and are specifically called The Disciples in the cast list. The secret comes out at the end of a children’s party/Last Supper. When the apprehended Blakey is being frisked by police, his posture, with arms outstretched to his sides, is a clear reference to the Crucifixion.”

I asked Hayley Mills (the daughter of the late great actor Sir John Mills who went on to star in so many Disney films, TV and theatre) about what it was like to act in a film based on her mother’s book.

“It was great because it was not only her story but it was directed by a very, very old friend of the family, Bryan Forbes, the first picture he directed,” she said. “The producer was Richard Attenborough, a very old friend of the family, so it really was a family picture. But the difference was that the book which our mum wrote was actually very sort of loosely based on all of us and it was set in the south of England on a farm and they were much more knowing and sophisticated children and the scriptwriters (Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall)….transferred it to the north.”

She believed the “key to its success” was setting it in Lancashire around the village of Clitheroe.

“I loved the story,” she said. “It was one of those things where all the elements that came in worked so brilliantly, not least the music by Malcolm Arnold…and the whistle in that film was Dickie Attenborough, that was him whistling. And Alan Bates was such a brilliant actor.”

(I agree – this was his first starring role. Check out the totally insanely brilliant King of Hearts and of course Women in Love – can anybody who saw it ever forget Bates and Oliver Reed wrestling naked?) In the mid 1990s, Whistle Down the Wind was adapted into a musical by Russell Labey and Richard Taylor for the National Youth Music Theatre. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman later created a more commercial adaptation of it.

Juliet Mills’ husband, Maxwell Caulfield, who plays the producer in Legends, was at the same press conference and he fondly remembers how “wonderful” it was to see Lady Mary taking a bow and a “royal wave” from the balcony during the West End Andrew Lloyd Webber production in the West End around 15 years ago.

Critics talk about the early 60s as being a time of high creativity in English cinema Whistle Down the Wind is a perfect example of that.

This article was first published on Diana’s blog- http://www.dianaplater.com/