The Secret Garden

Cholera kills Mary Lennox's parents and she is shipped from India to England, to the remote estate of her uncle Craven. She arrives sullen and closed off. The house has locked rooms, a crying she hears at night, and a garden that has been shut for years. As Mary finds that garden and brings it back, everyone in the house begins to change with it. It is adapted from Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel, and its cleverest decision is about colour: the house and everything around it are in black and white, and as the garden comes alive the scenes shift into Technicolor. Margaret O'Brien and Dean Stockwell play the children. For a children's film the tone is genuinely dark, and it never softens the illness or the neglect.