Boorman’s ‘Wonderful War’ Remembered in ‘Hope’

John Boorman is not a better writer than he is a film maker than he is a writer. His films are full of moments of visual astonishment, hard to equal on a printed page. So it may simply be that he has those two talents in equal proportion. That was apparent from his earlier book, “The Emerald Forest Diary,” which managed to shed light on both the mystic highs and the bottom line of that film’s extraordinary odyssey.

He extends that talent now in the memoir, postscript and cautionary chapter that surrounds his published screenplay for “Hope and Glory,” this season’s most thoroughly satisfying movie.

For Americans it may be one of the first times that we’ve seen, or even thought of, London in World War II as anything but crises, heroics and the British ability to endure--an image carried to us by two instantly identifiable voices, that of the sepulchral Edward R. Murrow and the tenacious Winston Churchill. Boorman’s film gives us the British stiff upper lip with a faint milk mustache: It belongs to 7-year-old Bill Rohan, Boorman’s alter ego, through whose eyes much of the war was a schoolboy’s dream.

Since “Hope and Glory” is a dearly autobiographical film, Boorman writes the opening memoir to this book to set the Rohans, with whom we go through the Blitz, in sociological perspective. Its primary setting, that broad street of sturdy brick houses, their gates and leaded glass windows emblazoned by the optimistic emblem of a rising sun, was the “semi suburbia” where Boorman grew up; a location that some of its occupants were just settling into when the war crashed around their ears in 1939.

Boorman is candid: “I grew up wishing I had been higher born; then in the ‘60s that I could claim to be lower born,” and he is lucid on the subject of his origins: “This new middle class came from all parts and stations, disowning their lowly past . . . so that most of the children I knew had no interest in where they came from, no memory of family history. Privacy protected our uncertainty about how to behave. On the whole we were enjoying a new prosperity.”

The emptiness in this snug void was filled by the radio, and by “American movies or snobbish English ones. We never imagined ever meeting such people or sharing their experience, which isolated us further still. We lacked the skill to reflect on what we had become. . . . We took on the daft, foolish looks of institutionalized people, never certain how to speak or walk or behave. Grief embarrassed us; we shrank from gaiety, turned our faces from any kind of public display of feeling.

“How wonderful was the war. It gave common cause, equal rations, community endeavor, but most delightful of all a myth, nurtured by wireless, newspaper and cinema, that allowed the ‘semi’ people to leap their garden gates, vault over their embarrassments into the arms of patriotism.”

These are the good, unquestioning, brave adults of the movie; seen in a slightly different light with the information from Boorman’s background memoir. From Noel Coward to the Monty Pythons to David Leland and “Wish You Were Here,” and a score more references in between, American audiences have had the corseting refinements of the English middle class laid bare in tones that varied from scathing to affectionate. “Hope and Glory” is interesting because we have a chance to see them in several lights at once.

They are those indomitable householders who did muddle through the Blitz, no matter the cost. Their children will be the last generation raised to believe unquestioningly in the divine reach of the British Empire. And, in the view of Grace Rohan’s father--the sulfurous and wicked Grandfather George (Ian Bannen), called “Dada” by his family--their comfortable suburbs were the great throttlers of individuality and imagination.

After disaster strikes their house, the Rohans are forced to evacuate to Grandfather and Grandmother George’s white Victorian cottage on the Thames. “Dada” regards it as a liberation for all his daughter’s family, not only for the children, allowed to run barefoot and free. The handsome, white-haired, perpetually fulminating “Dada,” considers that Grace (Sarah Miles) has barely escaped suburbia with her wits about her--he has less than no opinion of her husband who put her there, nor, indeed, of any of his four daughters’ marital choices.

But it’s these daughters, Faith, Hope, Charity (and Grace)--so named by their mother for the very qualities their “Dada” supposedly lacked--whom we begin to see as the film’s affectionate safety net, always there should it ever be needed. “Hope and Glory” is also a portrait of an enveloping family, largely, triumphantly female, whose four daughters formed a string quartet and whose conversation, as Boorman remembers it, was like the uninterrupted flow of music, complementing, supporting, echoing each other’s thoughts. And much as young Bill (the perfectly chosen Sebastian Rice Edwards) may squirm or roll his eyes at the thunderbolts of emotion or the unfathomable shifts of mood he witnesses daily, we sense his fascination with this mysterious, challenging world of women.

“Hope and Glory” is also a paean to family itself: to the cherished jokes, traditions, the whole sinew that binds generations together and which seems especially powerful and poignant to us today. We know, for example, that Grandfather’s hilarious mouse hunt--and Bill’s small, almost dead-pan joke which caps it--will go straight into family lore, to be retold endlessly.

What becomes fascinating to trace in Boorman’s book is just how much his Grandfather’s stance of the unquestioned skipper at the head of his family’s frail bark rubbed off on his 8-year-old grandson. Boorman writes about a period around 1968, when he had made two films in Hollywood and he, his wife and their four children had “six little green cards and a house on the beach in the Malibu Colony. While California was bizarre, I could deal with it; when it started to seem normal, I panicked. . . . Our girls were soon sunsoaked, marinated in Coca-Cola and blanding by the day.” His solution? To flee to Ireland, a leap into the past. “Convalescent from L.A. future shock, we fell back together into myth.”

His family, he found, soon turned in upon itself and Boorman, with one son and three daughters, found himself re-creating the conditions of childhood, where he himself had two sisters and no brother. It’s no surprise that so many of Boorman’s films from this point on--”Excalibur,” “Zardoz,” “Emerald Forest,” and now “Hope and Glory”--have had myth and mystery at their back.

Heaven knows, you don’t need these slim chapters to enjoy “Hope and Glory”; even allowing for its child’s-eye view, which has filtered out the starkly tragic, it’s a magnificently irresistible film. What the paperback book (published in England by Faber and Faber but available at Book Soup and a few other selected Los Angeles bookstores) allows us is the chance to stretch out our time with this rich and loving family--and after taking your leave of them on the screen, you, too, may want to postpone the parting.