Whistle Down the Wind is a 1961 British crime drama film directed by Bryan Forbes and starring Hayley Mills, Bernard Lee and Alan Bates.

Three Lancashire farm children discover a bearded fugitive (the Man/Arthur Blakey) hiding in their barn and mistake him for Jesus Christ.

Blakey – initially confused about why the three Bostock children are eager to protect him from adult discovery – makes no attempt to correct their mistake, especially when he discovers the eldest child, Kathy, is determined to keep him hidden from the local police, despite the posters circulating in the nearby town that reveal he is wanted for murder.

At Charles's birthday party, Nan takes an extra piece of cake and lets slip it is "for Jesus".

Attenborough hired Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall to write the script and Guy Green to direct.

Local schoolchildren from the Lancashire villages around Burnley and Clitheroe were used as extras; children from Chatburn Primary School played the 'disciples'.

It played there for three weeks, ending its run on 9 August, three days after it began its general release in the London area.

The other is the film's own illustration of a childhood world, secret and fantastic and sufficiently sturdy to withstand the intrusion of a good deal of pretentious symbolism ...

Though Bernard Lee and Elsie Wagstaffe are excellent as the father and the aunt, the best moments are provided by Alan Barnes as the six-year-old with a bleak, firm line in scepticism; and by Diane Holgate as his snootily unshakable sister.

Hayley Mills, caught half-way between the child's faith and the adult's disillusion, fails, through no fault of her own, to bridge the gap.

The split is in the script, and she conceals the tedium which must have accompanied the brilliant coaching of the younger children with a potent, concentrated professionalism.

Arthur Ibbetson's photography endows the hedges, ditches, ponds and muggy weather of the moorland locations with a beauty all their own.

Bryan Forbes, directing for the first time, reveals a painstaking, often incisive talent for behaviour rather than a marked personal style.

"[10] Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times: [11] "While it deals with sensitive material that might seem blasphemous to some – and, indeed, might well be embarrassing if it weren't handled with consummate skill and taste – it is beautifully simple, naturalistic and remote from religiosity as it tells, with great humor and compassion, of children and brotherly love.

The story is elementary, so simple and inviting, indeed, that one wonders now why it hadn't been written long before it was recently put into a novel by Mary Hayley Bell. ...

[16] In 1996 Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman created another musical adaptation, including the songs "Vaults of Heaven", "Whistle Down the Wind" by Tina Arena, and "No Matter What", which became a hit for Boyzone.