The Railway Children Return: A plodding affair that seems to annoy the right people

If you were looking for reasons to applaud this unexpected disinterment of another era’s nostalgia — nostalgia squared if you will — you could note how impressively it undercuts right-wing expectations. The Railway Children Return is exactly the sort of film angry British news sources think kids should be watching.

Catching up with a key character from Lionel Jeffries’s 1970 adaptation of an admired E Nesbitt novel, Morgan Matthews’s tolerable romp features no swearing, no smartphones and no nose piercings. Plucky kids in sensible knitwear finish their sponge cake and run off to scuff knees in Yorkshire rail cuttings. Britain is preparing for D-Day. Evening sun brushes country churchyards. What are those blue-remembered hills ...

Hang on, Mabel. What’s this? “Now even The Railway Children have gone woke, it’s clear the culture war is lost,” a broadsheet newspaper actually thundered last week. Nobody tell them Nesbit, a socialist, was co-founder of the Fabian Society.

Railway Children: Maverick (indulge me) is set some 40 years after the cosy Edwardian fun of Jeffries’s original. Jenny Agutter, who played plucky Bobbie, makes a welcome return as a grandmaternal version of the same character. A group of evacuees has arrived from Manchester and, after a spell of disorientation, they take to messing about with young locals down by the tracks.

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One day they find a young black GI who has deserted after repeated racist treatment from the Military Police. The manoeuvring of Black Lives Matter into the plot is a tad contrived, but if that annoys the right people it is to some useful end. Those retired Colonels in Walton-on-Thames may be even more furious about editorialising on the era’s Prime Minister. “Churchill is undoubtedly a great man, but I wish he’d been a bit more supportive of us suffragettes,” Bobbie snorts.

For all that welcome provocation, the new film is a plodding affair, characterised more by fastidious set dressing than by narrative tension. The requirement to end with the halting of a train leads to yet more clunky plotting. The final deus ex machina is absurdly unlikely even if it does educate about an underappreciated figure in American history.

Anybody who grew up with the original will, nonetheless, delight at seeing Agutter pop up less changed than we had any right to expect. Now bring back Hayley Mills in Whistle Down the Wind Again.