Mandy

The only avowedly 'serious' film of Mackendrick's superb Ealing quintet, Mandy is also the first expression of his abiding fascination with the psychology and revealingly distorted perception of a child, developed later in The Maggie and, triumphantly, in Sammy Going South and A High Wind in Jamaica. Nevertheless, the director focuses as tightly on the emotional traumas and narrowed perspectives of the parents as he does on the deaf-and-dumb little girl of the title, revealing their senses to be almost as numbed as hers. Paradoxically, but with much justification, it has often been pointed out that the film's true theme is blindness.