Wonderful character development!

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Wow, I can't believe reviews saying the boy was a bad actor. He is perfectly natural and adorable. Also, the color was magnificent, gritty, yet vibrant. Black and white would not have added anything to the colorful market days and red neon nights. This is a real gem and I highly recommend seeing it. I'm confused why it's considered a fantasy though, since nothing happens that couldn't happen in real life. This film really gives you a sense of place and time, and you feel you know these people and that they are real and a tight knit loving community so different from modern times. There is so much wit, wordplay and attention to detail. It's the little things that make it so nice, like the man watching ballet on the TV while the wrestling match is going on. This film is compelling and utterly charming. I highly recommend it.

This has just been shown on the UK's Channel 4 series of Carol Reed films. I watched it having read the reviews here on IMDb. It is a lovely uncomplicated tale of a little boy in the east end of London. Were he any other age he would be an annoying brat. He is in that 6 month time of innocent acceptance of the world around him and wishing good for everyone. The cast is well picked and work nicely together. The story is secondary to the time capsule of Joe's memories which he can cherish in adulthood. It would be great to know how Jonathan Ashmore looks back on the film. I believe he never made another. There must be hundreds of childhood tales in every city. This is a particularly nice telling of one of them.

Seeing this film for the first time today, the first thing you notice is just how vibrant the colours are and just how unsuited to colour the film is. Black-and-white might have given the film an edge; colour only makes it look like a sub-Runyon yarn. It's set in London's East End and is certainly full of Runyonesque characters, this time courtesy of Wolf Mankowitz. The next thing you notice is just how terrible it is and how terribly miscast it is.Who, apart perhaps from Carol Reed, could have envisaged marble-mouthed Celia Johnson as a working-class East End mother? Is it any wonder her toffee-nosed brat of a boy, (Jonathan Ashmore, never heard of again), talks as if he's been taking elocution lessons. Then there's Joe Robinson, the most Runyonesque character of all, another improbably polite strongman engaged to Diana Dors, (not bad, considering). And no East End movie of the period would be complete without David Kossoff as a Yiddish tailor, (did he come out of the womb talking and looking like that?).It's about Ashborne buying a young goat with a single horn which he believes is a unicorn. It's meant to be heart-warming. We are supposed to love the child and his goat. I wanted to skin them alive. The film is hardly ever revived. Even Carol Reed retrospectives tend to ignore it. Now I know why.

I thought Primo Carnera did a good job here. His English is very good and he finally has a chance to do some acting. Probably the only chance to see Carnera, in color, as a normal person, and not as some freak of nature playing some other freak of nature.