Many of Boorman’s best works center around a protagonist whose placid existence is suddenly transformed by a strange and violent eruption from the outside world. In Hope and Glory, it is Bill, a nine year-old living in London, whose life is upturned and intensified by the brutality of the 1940-41 Blitz. As the grownups worry, the adolescents flirt and fall in love, and the children rejoice in the freedom afforded by the disruptions of the bombing. The film is perhaps Boorman’s most classical, linking streamlined storytelling at its most entertaining to the director’s fascination with the anarchic side of human nature that is both troubling and cathartic.