Post-Blitz London starts as a playground and ends as a shadowy nightmare for 12-year-old Frankie (Andrew Ray). The Yellow Balloon is both a fine film about children and Britain’s second X certificate release, not really a contradiction as it shrugs off its early disguise as a kids’ adventure yarn to explore how vulnerable a child’s life can be.
Frankie is the happy son of loving parents Ted and Em (Kenneth More and Kathleen Ryan), given sixpence to buy a yellow balloon. A swift sequence of thoughtless misadventures leave his friend a corpse fallen from a bombed-out building, watched by crooked adult Len (William Sylvester), who manipulates the terrified boy to help his own fatal mischief.
Director and co-writer J. Lee-Thompson (he’d drop the hyphen for Hollywood and The Guns of Navarone) shot partly in the working-class council estates and streets of 1953’s war-scarred Chelsea. Frankie’s first criminal act is to steal a pineapple from ageing barrow boy Sid James, and Bond’s future M Bernard Lee is a burly bobby on the beat. But there’s a realistic sense of echoing stairwells and weary labour in this London, where More’s basically kindly dad believes kids are “little savages”, and takes his belt to a son inexplicably slipping from his grasp.
The film belongs to wide-eyed Ray as Frankie, scared and innocent enough to be perverted, and William Sylvester, whose soft American accent adds to Len’s languid mix of menace and charm (Ray and Sylvester pictured left). Thompson makes Len’s head loom hugely down on Frankie’s dwarfed child’s view and, from the blinding neon of an amusement arcade to the final horror of Len stalking Frankie through a bombed-shut tube station’s crepuscular circles of hell, a happy ending seems far away. There are echoes of Harry Lime and Bill Sykes in Len’s last scenes, and this is a London tale Dickens would understand.
