THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE

EXPLOITS AT WEST POLEY

Title: Exploits at West Poley
Year of Release: 1985
Director: Diarmuid Lawrence
Country of Production: Britain
Production company: Children's Film and Television Foundation
Principal Boy Actors: Charlie Condou (as Leonard), Jonathan Jackson (Stephen), Noel O'Connell (Job Tray). Jacob Thomas also gets a credit as the Young Boy with the spyglass.
Genre: Drama
Length: 1 hr
Language: English
Availability: The BFI have released the film on DVD as part of their Children's Film Foundation Bumper Box Vol. 3.

Synopsis and Commentary
Two boys find the underground source of a river running through West Poley, and divert it so that it runs through East Poley instead, causing friction between the two villages.

The film, based on a short story by Thomas Hardy, Our Exploits at West Poley: A Story for Boys, published in 1892, is one of the last productions of the Children's Film and Television Foundation (formerly the Children's Film Foundation), and one of the best, with fine attention to historical detail. Much of the action takes place in an underground cavern, which looks so realistic that one wouldn't guess that it was actually built in studio.

This was in fact the second CFF production of this Thomas Hardy story, the first being the 1953 film The Secret Cave, which is so far unavailable on DVD.

Given the excellence of this production, it is a pity that it was, according to the BFI, "largely unseen" at cinemas - though it won awards on the festival circuit - and belatedly turned up on television in the early 1990s; a circumstance that has led some to think, mistakenly, that it was a made-for-TV movie.

The booklet supplied by the BFI to accompany the release of this film on their DVD box set goes out of its way to praise the adult actors - including Sean Bean, who has the minutest of blink-and-you'll-miss-it parts - but has nothing whatever to say about the boy actors who carry the bulk of this movie on their young shoulders. In this, of course, it follows the tradition of giving adult actors the credit for their acting, whilst either ignoring the young actors altogether, or giving the credit for their acting to the director, for his supposedly having wrung such a worthy performance from them. The boys might as well be invisible.

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