Talk:Sammy Going South

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Fergus McClelland's backgound

"Alexander Mackendrick thought that Fergus was perfect for the role. 'He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails...a really strong character”, said Mackendrick. 'He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting. But when he went out to Africa, he started having the time of his life. The unit adored him and, to my dismay, started to feed him...he put on weight and there was no way I could stop it. So, instead of this hunted and abused child, who’s supposed to be starving and neurotic, you had a sturdy, stocky, well fed little character. A good actor, but the physique betrayed itself.'"

This excerpt makes it seem like Fergus McClelland was chosen for the part after an exhaustive search of British (or perhaps London) hardscrabble schools for just the right kid, one who seemed a natural for the part because of his own life; perhaps a "tough as nails" street-wise kid. If so, then it must have been just a coincidence that his father was the Northern Ireland born British actor Allan McClelland (1917-1989) who had numerous credits over many years including the television series Emergency Ward-10 on which Fergus made an appearance in an episode.

I’m not saying that anything in the article is untrue per se, but it does seem to present a metaphorical picture of the boy’s background incongruous with reality. (Maybe his parents were going through a divorce at the time (I don’t know), but that hardly implies the boy was being abused. He attended a highbrow school favored by genteel socialists like the once aristocratic Tony Benn (“The Red Baron”)). If Mackendrick thought that Fergus was too pampered by the cast and crew of the movie in Africa and thus gained too much weight and appeared more sturdy than he had desired, then I would suggest that the kid at the time of his casting must have been well-nigh emaciated as in the movie he appears as a typical skinny kid of that age. This entire scenario seems disingenuous to me, but so be it.HistoryBuff14 (talk) 14:33, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

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The information has been taken from the 1991 book "Lethal Innocence - The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick" by Philip Kemp in which Kemp interviewed Mackendrick extensively about the making of each of his films. So at best, this is what Kemp reported Mackendrick as saying about Fergus McClelland and "Sammy Going South". (DavidRayner (talk) 10:19, 5 December 2015 (UTC)) David Rayner.