Film · 1961 · Films · 1960s
Whistle Down the Wind
Scored from 43 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Bryan Forbes's first film as director, adapted from Mary Hayley Bell's novel, is set on a bleak Lancashire farm. Kathy Bostock (Hayley Mills) and her younger sister and brother find a bearded, injured man (Alan Bates) hiding in their barn; startled awake, he mutters 'Jesus Christ', and Kathy takes the answer literally. Certain the Savior has come to their farm, the children keep him hidden from every adult, smuggle him food, and gradually let the other village children in on the secret. The police, meanwhile, are combing the district for a fugitive wanted for murder, and the gap between what the children believe and what the grown-ups know keeps narrowing.
Whistle Down the Wind (1961) is a film IMDb files under the crime and drama genres. It was made in the United Kingdom. The runtime is 99 minutes.
1,928 other films from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 90 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 43 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 46 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Whistle Down the Wind lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1960s (1,929 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 43.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
