Got a book off the shelf today, it's going to tell me what I should say

[sovay]

This cold has now officially progressed to the lying-on-the-couch-coughing-staring-at-movies stage. I don't know whether to forecast reviews or radio silence. Might depend on the movies. Angel Face (1953) by Otto Preminger was noir by the numbers to me until it opened into the perspective of its main female character, at which point the story of a spoilt seductress, the patsy who wants no part of her, and a murder gone wrong becomes much less familiarly nasty, much more unavoidably tragic—it has a killer ending and a performance that I hope Jean Simmons is remembered for, even if so much of it only becomes exemplary in hindsight. I had no idea the original live TV version of Twelve Angry Men (1954) had even been recorded, but the smutchy, irreplaceable kinescope runs exactly an hour, is very effectively less personal than the later stage and film versions, and proves that when I thought Robert Cummings was underpowered as a leading man in The Black Book (1949), he was probably just underwritten. I had the company of a very good movie cat and later my husband (who points out that Twelve Angry Men directly prefigures 1776 in its exploration of important civic issues through a male ensemble yelling at each other in a very hot room—it even uses the same device of counting down each vote toward consensus or catastrophe). Also the cold, but it is an unwelcome guest.