It might be possible on the basis of Wakefield Express to imagine Anderson as a soft-hearted liberal, a sentimental kind of humanist who rather uncritically loves people, the quainter the better. But the humanity of Thursday's Children is something altogether tougher, harder won…. Though the information conveyed by the film is by no means uncomplicatedly optimistic—only a third of the children, we learn, can ever hope to achieve true speech—Thursday's Children comes across as a hymn to man's potential, a study not so much of suffering as of triumph over suffering. (p. 74)

If Thursday's Children showed a new tough-mindedness in Anderson's work, O Dreamland moved further into something very like savagery…. (p. 75)

[The] film could superficially be read as a denunciation of the exploitation of the working classes in a consumer society where rubbish such as we see for ourselves was all that was offered as...