The Evacuees (1975 TV Movie) User Reviews

The Evacuees

[Prismark10 · 7/10 · 11 May 2019]

There are those American film writer types that deconstruct Casablanca as the perfect screenplay. You know look at Bogart and Bergman's clothes in that market scene. They have stripes which means they are imprisoned.

A British writer held out Jack Rosenthal's The Evacuees as an example of good writing. Show not tell.

This BBC television movie is Alan Parker's first full length feature. Until then he had made his name in the advertising world. He would go on to become an acclaimed movie director.

The Evacuees is a simple story. As war against Germany nears, young Jewish boys from Manchester are sent to the seaside either to Blackpool or Lytham St Annes.

I am not sure how it worked in reality but in this drama. The teacher takes the kids around knocking on doors and dropping the kids off to anyone willing to take them.

The Miller brothers are evacuated to an elderly couple, the Graham's. Against their Jewish religion they have to eat pork sausages. They also have to do housework and they suspect Mrs Graham's is destroying the letters that their mum sent them. They are miserable along with the other lads.

Back in Manchester, Rosenthal does not write a scene where the Miller's describe how miserable they are. You see them quietly eating dinner as there are two empty chairs in the room.

The strange thing is despite showing no outward signs of caring for the kids, Mrs Graham really wanted the children to stay with her and was pleased to have them. Again there is a scene where she smells the children's clothes after she cleaned them.

It is these little things that make the drama stand out.

Definitely not "Snowflakes" these wee lads

[gmsdoggies · 8/10 · 11 January 2020]

I remember watching this little gem of a film many years ago. Was delighted to see it pop up today on the Drama channel and even though I was subjected to the usual "save for your funeral adverts" in the interval I really enjoyed it. It occurred to me that my childhood in the 60s was great fun where you made a lot of your own craic without phones, computers and the like spoiling a child's creativity. Also we were still allowed a certain amount of freedom in which to grow, explore and find our boundaries and limits. I grew up in (NI) during the troubles so could see parallels with these children growing up in World War 2 and how it affected their childhood. I would love to see a group of young boys watch this today and I am sure they would enjoy it and feel it was a great adventure as children are so cosseted today and managed they don't get the time to make their own fun like these lads did.

Outstanding depiction of young people during WW2

[imdbk12 · 10/10 · 19 January 2014]

This was officially a BBC "Drama" but is to all intents and purposes, a film. Especially with Jack Rosenthal's involvement.

We are introduced to a group of Jewish boys from a working-class area of Manchester who, in the first year or so of the Second World War, are evacuated to Blackpool or St Annes. Their teacher, also Jewish, makes every effort to find all of them homes.

The lead characters of the film are the two Miller brothers, Neville and Danny, from a practising Jewish family. Neville, the elder, is starting to enter adolescence. Near the start of the film their grandmother, an émigrée from Eastern Europe, enters the classroom to protest against their being evacuated, only to be told it is just a drill. When the boys are eventually sent away her concerns are more muted, possibly because her own travels involved having to move hundreds of miles west with no possibility of return, especially after the rise of the Nazis - whereas the boys are only a train journey away and will probably come back.

The Miller boys are put up with a middle aged couple, and are badly treated from the outset. Their teacher had warned them they might not be able to keep kosher due to having to stay in non-Jewish households, however their host Mrs Graham steals food which their mother sends, that can be assumed to be kosher. We later learn that Mrs Graham does hold some feelings towards the boys, but only of a selfish nature that would involve requiring them to abandon their cultural and religious origins. In any event, Neville and Danny develop a deep dislike of Mrs Graham, and Danny is the more outspoken. Neville takes a more stoical approach.

We are shown two visits from Neville and Danny's mother, played by Maureen Lipman. On the first visit, their mother sees little to trouble her, notwithstanding a few hints from Danny. On the second, Danny lets her know in no uncertain terms how he and Neville have been treated, and she immediately takes them both home.

Throughout the film we see the development of the relationship between the brothers, of whom Danny - the younger - is clearly deeply thoughtful and analytical, and perceived by all his family to be a possible future Rabbi.

As a resident of Lytham St Annes for most of my life, this film means a lot to me. I recognise many of the filming locations. For a time I lived between the footbridge and the Graham household which are only about 100m apart and the house I lived in is shown in one of the scenes. This is by no means a cause for pride, because my own landlady was made in the same mould as Mrs Graham, and could well have been her daughter.

Some of the other locations no longer exist, such as the former St John's School on Warton Street - rebuilt in another part of Lytham - and the Floral Hall on St Annes pier, destroyed by fire just after the film was made.

The film is based in fact, as many Manchester children were evacuated to Lytham St Annes, and faced the same snobbery and other prejudice depicted in the film.

My only criticism of the film is that some of the other characters, such as Zuckerman ("Zucky") are not seen as often as they could have been.

All in all, this film needs more recognition both as a part of British heritage and specific working-class Jewish heritage. If you manage to get to see it, you will not have wasted an hour and a bit if you watch it from start to end.

Intensely personal, superbly-scripted teleplay

[rick_7 · 10 June 2010]

The Evacuees (Alan Parker, 1975) is a little gem from the pen of Jack Rosenthal, based on his experiences of leaving Manchester for Blackpool during the dark days of World War Two. Gary Carp and Steven Serember are the youngsters who are casually brutalised after changing the city for the seaside, but resolve to keep their unhappiness from their put-upon mother. The film has moments of levity and humour, particularly in the opening minutes, but emerges as a much darker and more troubling work than Rosenthal's teleplay set in the aftermath of war: the joyous P'tang Yang Kipperbang.

Its considerable impact is aided by acute observation and the sense it has been ripped from life, exemplified by the quietly horrifying scene in which the boys are forced to eat pork by their unthinking hosts. As well as being an insightful look at a phenomenon of wartime not ill-served by popular culture, the film doubles as a portrait of an inner-city Jewish community, with Rosenthal fashioning a gutting contrast with the plight of Jews being heaped onto trains in other countries – one of their orphaned children a recent arrival in Manchester. Such heavy subtexts are balanced by showing the story largely through the eyes of children, meaning we also get several scenes based around the older boy's picture of a woman in a swimsuit and an escape sequence set to the strains of the Dick Barton theme, in which the boys wear one roller-skate and one shoe each.

This intensely personal, doggedly unsentimental film, which grabbed a BAFTA for the year's best script, is slightly disjointed and loses some momentum in the final third, but it's full of lovely little touches and there are superb turns from Maureen Lipman – as the boys' mother – and Paul Besterman, playing the boys' resourceful pal Zuckerman. He cropped up in Parker's Bugsy Malone the next year, as Yonkers.

Marvellous film

[malcolmgsw · 10/10 · 21 November 2020]

This was a superb tv film from the pen of Jack Rosenthal starring his wife Maureen Lipman,and the first film directed by Alan Parker.I can recognise members of my own family in the characters depicted here.