A tale of teen (or rather pre-teen) love. In a very traditional school in England (where corporal punishment is still practiced), a boy and a girl (both about twelve) fall in love. Relatively realistic during most of its running time, during the final twenty minutes it falls into anarchist fantasy, as the children in the school thwart the attempts of the parents and the school masters to prevent their elopement and marriage. Unlike other reviewers, I didn't watch this as a child: it's not filtered by childhood memories, so I think I can judge it better as a movie. It's a good romantic story, sometimes demagogic, sometimes overwrought in its criticisms of traditional England, but it's still irresistible. The actress playing the girl, the beautiful Tracy Hyde, is fantastic (unfortunately, and despite her obvious talents, she never became a major star) The screenplay was by Alan Parker (the director was the unknown Waris Hussein, who would never made a major movie again). There is a great score, mostly by the Bee Gees, but the best song is probably is "Teach the Children" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The fine color photography is sometimes reminiscent of a 70s commercial, but it also let you see the ravishing London of almost forty years ago (one of the best scenes have the young lovers skipping school and sightseeing around London). A relative failure in England and the United States when released, this nevertheless became a huge hit in Latin America and the Far East (specially, Japan). Incredibly, this movie has been very seldom shown in television, and the DVD is unavailable in many countries (including the US).
