In London's East End, 12-year-old Frankie Palmer loses the sixpence his father has given him to buy a large yellow balloon from a street seller that the boy has set his heart on. He sees that a friend of his, young Ronnie Williams has already bought one and Frankie snatches it off him and runs off with it, with Ronnie in hot pursuit. Ronnie chases Frankie into a large, bombed-out house and they are running about in the ruins when Ronnie slips and falls thirty feet to his death. Frankie scrambles down to help, but realises that there is nothing he can do. Hiding in the shadows and seeing it all, Len Turner, a criminal on the run and using the ruins as a hideout from the police, convinces Frankie that the police will arrest the boy and charge him with the murder of his friend for pushing him to his death and that they must both make their getaway. Although Frankie and Len agree it was an accident, Len is adamant that the police will not see it that way and Frankie goes off with him. Len blackmails Frankie into stealing money from his parents to help fund Len's escape and then uses the boy as a decoy in a pub robbery that goes horribly wrong when Len murders the pub owner. Realising that Frankie is the only witness to his crime, Len knows he must kill the boy, too. This develops into a terrifying hide-and-seek chase through a bomb-damaged, abandoned and highly-perilous London Underground station, with Len hot on the heels of Frankie, who is desperately trying to escape with his life.
The film was based on an idea of Anne Bunbury. Star Andrew Ray had just appeared in The Mudlark. William Sylvester was an American who settled in England after the war. Filming took place in October-November 1952. It was shot at Elstree and on location around London.
Censorship
The Yellow Balloon was one of the first films to be passed with the then new Adults Only "X" certificate by the British Board of Film Censors, which barred anyone under the age of 16 years from being allowed into a cinema to see the film. This was because the censor felt that the chase through the London Underground station in the last reel would be very frightening for young children and Andrew Ray, 13-years-old when the film was shot in 1952 and 14-years-old when it was released in May, 1953, was disappointed that he wasn't allowed to go into a cinema to see his own film because he was under the age of 16. However, after complaints from cinema exhibitors that the "X" certificate wasn't really necessary for the film and it was losing them the family audience they had relied on up until that time, the BBFC eventually relented and in October 1953 they re-classified the film with an "A" certificate.
Reception
Critical reception
The Observer called it "a forceful and far from stupid British film which we might have appreciated more had we not seen The Window." Variety said it "should chalk up modest grosses." In The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther wrote: "it is a leisurely sort of chiller that trades intriguingly upon a youngster's far-fetched fears...The moral is, of course, that children should speak up rather than harbor their fears. But they don't. So probably the British will be able to go right on making these variably fascinating films for years".
