Film

Hope and Glory

Name: Hope and Glory
Genre: Drama, War, Family
Released: 1987
Cast: Sebastian Rice-Edwards, Geraldine Muir, Sarah Miles, David Hayman, Sammi Davis

John Boorman's memoir of a boy's Blitz-era London recast as glorious mischief: bombs fall, houses burn, and to ten-year-old Bill it's the best thing that's ever happened. Funny, tender and stubbornly unsentimental about grief, it's for anyone who suspects the truest war stories are sometimes the ones nobody thought to dramatise as tragedy.

TMDb rating

6.9

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Another warm, wounded memory of a childhood shaped by outside forces beyond a boy's control — here it's cinema itself, not war, that both rescues him and wrecks him.

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Louis Malle's own WWII childhood memoir, set in occupied France, trades Boorman's mischief for quiet dread — the same obliviousness of childhood, except the danger closing in is entirely real.

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A long, unhurried procedural set on the WWII home front, for anyone who wants Hope and Glory's world — rationing, blackouts, small-town England under strain — stretched across dozens of hours.

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Swallows and Amazons1974

For the purest hit of English childhood-as-adventure, minus the war: children commandeering the countryside for their own games, the same delighted disregard for adult danger that Boorman's Bill has for bombs.

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Same national instinct Boorman is quietly diagnosing — turning existential threat into performance and mischief — but stretched into pure sitcom instead of memoir, home front as farce rather than near-miss.

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People

Cast

Directing

John BoormanDirector

Writing

John BoormanWriter

Production

Mary SelwayCasting
Michael DryhurstCo-Producer
Edgar F. GrossExecutive Producer
Jake EbertsExecutive Producer