Just months later Katie Johnson (whose resemblance here to a statue of Queen Victoria is explicitly remarked upon) was sharing a much darker film with Peter Sellars (presently fifteenth in the cast list), this time recalling the Old Queen's death; at that time a more recent memory than the present Queen's coronation in 1953 is today.
This long-forgotten Group Three production follows the same narrative arc of the same year's 'The Night of the Hunter' of a small boy and an even smaller girl journeying across a landscape peopled by adults whose world they only dimly comprehend (or not at all, such as Moira Lister's profession) and occasionally frightens them.
While Laughton's film was deliberately stylised - shot largely on sound stages in gothic black & white - and this makes extensive use of locations and actuality footage of the Coronation parade itself, the fifties Eastmancolor in which it is bathed creates an experience in many ways just as strange to experience when seen today.
