162 HOPE AND GLORY
(by Boorman himself) the adult Bill Rowan remembers playing in the family gar-
den when war was declared (3 September 1939). Billy’s father, Clive (David Hay-
man), immediately enlists, but is assigned a desk job due to his age. Left at home
is Billy’s mother, Grace (Sarah Miles); Billy; and his two sisters: Dawn (Sammi Davis)
and Sue (Geraldine Muir). For their safety, Billy’s mother decides to send Billy and
Sue (ten and six years old, respectively) to live with an aunt in Australia, but at the
last minute she cannot bring herself to put them on the boat train. Mac (Derrick
O’Connor), Billy’s father’s best friend (and a former beau of Billy’s mother), spends
a lot of time at the Rohans’ house after his own wife, Molly (Susan Wooldridge),
runs off with a Polish aviator. With their own spouses out of the picture, Grace
and Mac begin to fall in love again but do not act on their feelings. Meanwhile,
Dawn (a teenager) sneaks out of the house at night for trysts with Cpl. Bruce Car-
rey ( Jean- Marc Barr), a Canadian soldier, and soon finds herself pregnant. For his
part, Billy joins other boys his age happily playing in and around bombed- out
buildings. One day, though, while Mac and the Rohans are at the seaside, their
house burns down (from an ordinary fire, not the result of a bomb blast), forcing
them to go live with Grace’s curmudgeonly father, George (Ian Bannen), in his bun-
galow on the River Thames. Billy enjoys a halcyon summer there. Madly in love
with Dawn, Bruce goes absent without leave (AWOL) to marry her, but is arrested
by the military police right after the wedding. Soon thereafter, Dawn gives birth
to their child. At the end of the summer Billy has to return to his old school in
suburban London but joyfully discovers that it has been destroyed by a stray Nazi
bomb. Billy shouts, “Thank you, Adolf!” In voice- over the adult Bill recalls, “In all
my life, nothing ever quite matched the perfect joy of that moment. My school lay
in ruins and the river beckoned with the promise of stolen days.”Reception
Hope and Glory had its premiere on 21 August 1987 at the Montreal Film Festival.
In the weeks following the film’s UK premiere (3 September 1987: the 48th anni-
versary of the United Kingdom’s entry into World War II), it was screened at film
festivals in Spain, Japan, and Italy. On 17 September 1987, three weeks before Hope
and Glory was scheduled to premiere in the United States at the New York Film
Festival, Columbia CEO David Puttnam was forced to resign. Puttnam had been
a strong supporter of the movie so his departure adversely affected the U.S. roll-
out, which was anemic at best. Columbia opened Hope and Glory at two theaters
in New York City on 16 October 1987 and gradually expanded into a modest 100
theaters by December, but stinted on promotion and advertising (e.g., it ran no TV
ads). To make matters worse, Columbia then had a dispute with one of its major
distributors and the film was pulled from circulation before Christmas— except
for a single theater in Greenwich Village. Luckily Columbia’s new CEO, Dawn Steel,
liked Hope and Glory and soon revived its fortunes. Just before the 1988 Oscar
nominations were announced, the movie was re- released in the United States. Dur-
ing its second run (5 February–14 April 1988; widest release: 328 theaters), it
grossed a respectable $9.7 million at the box office for a total of $10 million (inter-
national box office totals are unknown, but reports indicate that the film had brisk