Reading about this film in The Battle For Bond’; aside from his production and second unit work, it seems to be Kevin McClory’s most notable creative endeavour outside of his contributions to Thunderball and various attempts (one realised) to remake Thunderball thereafter:
Seems that it had some festival hype early on but then disappeared fairly quietly, and as far as I can tell was never released on VHS or DVD but is now available to rent (at least in the UK) from the BFI website. Has anyone ever seen it?
Read about it in Lycett’s Fleming bio. Apparently, the critics loved it and it was even expected to win one or the other award. Thing was that the audience didn’t, especially in America. As a result of this, the McClory name attached to the TB script in the making didn’t exactly help to sell the movie rights in Hollywood, which lead to the project getting stopped. Fleming didn’t want the material to go wasted and recycled it in the TB novel, which lead to… you know the rest.
Battle for Bond suggests that Fleming himself and the festival circuit received the film well, but even the first round of reviews from UK critics were a little tepid, and that it went downhill from there. McClory reportedly didn’t even pay much attention to its Box Office, which gave his business partners significant pause about his general financial acumen.
This is a wonderful film with a wonderful central performance by nine years old Ian MacLaine and an equally wonderful score by Malcolm Arnold. For some reason, perhaps through copyright problems, it has never been made available for VHS or DVD release or television showings in the UK. It should be released because it’s an utterly charming film. I am fortunate indeed to have an original British Front of House set of eight stills for it. Physical material for it, such as posters and stills, is impossible to find now on eBay or other sources and it must be one of the rarest still sets in my vast collection.
This is an excellent film with a good story line and fine scenes of 1950’s London.
I watched this as a young child on television. In a similar way to “The Red Balloon” it left a lasting impression.
It is available to watch on a pay to watch basis (£2.50) on the BFI site.
Hiya, Ian Maclaine is my grandad. His real name is Ian Mclenahan, but with him being young and new they had to change it for the film.
I am one of his son Alastairs daughter. The film was never publish on dvd or vhs apart from 1 copy that i knew of, that was given to my grandad…
However like the stupid sod i was when i was little, my primary school were doing topics on the old films, so i brought it in to show and for people to watch it.
The film was bever returned to me after that.
All in all the film was amazing and really well done, definitely worth a watch if you can find it online.
This is the best photo i could find of him for now. This was taken around 13 years ago
Thank you for the more up to date photo, Poppy. There is a book published a few years ago entitled The Film Music of Malcolm Arnold that contains five pages dedicated to The Boy and The Bridge which has a lot of information on Ian and the making of the film. For instance. The director changed Ian’s name to MacLaine because he was having an affair with Shirley MacLaine at the time (that was of course the director and not Ian). It’s reported that Kevin McClory had Ian working very hard on the film for months and that by the time of the film’s Royal Premiere in July, 1959, he felt ill. In fact at the premiere, after being presented to and shaking hands with Princess Margaret, he was violently sick. A doctor was called to him at the cinema and he diagnosed Ian as suffering from nervous exhaustion and prescribed plenty of rest and sleep for him. There is also a lot of information about Ian’s mum and dad and his family life and how things changed for them after the release of the film. All very interesting. I have a charming original press photo showing Ian returning to school after finishing work on the film, surrounded by his class mates. The Boy and The Bridge became the British entry in the Venice Film Festival in August, 1959. I have another press photo showing Ian with his mother and older brother paddling on the Lido beach in Venice during the festival.
