Great Britain

Swallows and Amazons (1974) a bright and breezy story of children on holiday in the Lake District in 1929. The kind of holiday, when parents know their place as providers of food, pocket money and encouragement and don't interfere or give unwanted advice. To that extent, Arthur Ransome's tale of six children messing about in boats sounds like almost any novel written for children between the Wars. But Ransome had a special talent for putting over the practical information that enquiring young minds - and older ones too-lap up avidly. He did ii by making the facts an integral part of the plot. 'During Ransome's lifetime (he died in 1967) the novelist and critic Eric Linklater wrote: 'He makes a tale of adventure a handbook to adventure'. Director Claude Whatham's nostalgically in-period holiday adventure film brings all Ransome's factual information to vivid life. How to sail a 13-foot dinghy; how to take in a reef or slip the halyard if the wind gets up; how to row; how to camp out like Robinson Crusoe, oven if you are only a little girl of nine; how foil thieves. In short, how to have good fun and keep your mind active at the same time. When Mrs Walker (Virginia McKenna) writes to her Naval Commander husband to ask if their four children may sail and camp out on an Island, he telegraphs BETTER DROWN THAN DUFFERS, IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN. This insistence on the desirability of intelligent self-reliance sets the mood of the story and of the film. They have a lot of weather in the Lake District, where mist and rain and racing clouds look picturesque and cause time-wasting delays to film makers. But Whatham is a calm and cheerful director and there is no sign of the many problems that had to be overcome in the making of this happy, colourful re-creation of the peaceful summer of 1929 when danger meant imaginary sharks and a ferocious ogre is only jolly Uncle Ronald Fraser pretending to be a big bad pirate, complete with parrot. MARJORIE BILBOW