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A sort of fear—as if it's dangerous to stay alive
The October Man (1947) sounds like a lost Bradbury; it is one of my favorite under-the-radar noirs. Without once mentioning the war, it uses the action of a murder mystery to create a character study of trauma and alienation that would fit a returning serviceman like a demob suit and might yet fit a civilian for a noose. In its shadowy way, it may be the best movie about mental illness I've seen from its decade.
"If the world's kind to him during the next few months, he'll be all right." So we are told of Jim Ackland (John Mills) on his discharge from Lufton Hospital following the road accident that gave him a double whammy of TBI and PTSD. He has a new job in London rather than Sheffield. He sets out to meet it with a commendable facsimile of nonchalance. But it doesn't seem a very kindly world that he's re-entering, this little collection of the shabbier end of genteel at the Brockhurst Common Hotel with its everlasting bridge games and its faded hothouse gossip. It might be a microcosm of Britain itself, cruelly magnified—the sea-changed world on the other side of the war, not just disorienting but terrifying. Actually, if Jim could explain his dented nerves as a function of his service record, they might vouch for his normality at least in the sense of having done his bit. For a white-faced man who sweats through social introductions and starts at the sound of his name, who seems to be haunting his room more than renting it and whose easily rattled, easily exhausted demeanor inspires confidence in no one including himself, a year in hospital is a different story even before anyone finds out what kind of hospital it was. Politely excusing himself for a quiet night in with a book, he finds himself publicly reproached as for a personal affront: "That's very unsociable." The worst sin under this burning-glass is not to fit in. But how is a person supposed to fit in who doesn't believe he has any right to be in the world at all?
Especially in light of the number of mysteries that treat the human mind as a grab-bag of plot devices, The October Man stands out not just for the realism of its psychology, but the compassion. Discussing Jim's case with an indifferent claims adjuster, Dr. Martin (Felix Aylmer) acknowledges the irrationality of his patient's guilt with the statement that "an injured brain isn't always logical . . . It may seem easier to take one's life than to go on living," but gives no ground to the suggestion that it must then spring from some preexisting weakness. Anyone can break down, even as practical and rational a figure as "an industrial chemist, intelligent and quite sane." The accident which serves as the film's prologue fully justifies the condition in which it leaves its protagonist. It recurs as it might in his memory, in slices of near silence like a bad dream: the night bus swaying, the storm-wet road, the bolt rattling loose in the rain-dashed wheel, the little girl clasping her toy rabbit in her arms as Jim transforms his handkerchief into a little rabbit-dolly of his own, the steam-throated scream of the train at the crossing, the spin-out, the stricken faces, the headlights that smash into the oncoming bricks horribly long before the bus and its passengers do. The child was killed in the crash, not prettily. Jim got off with a fractured skull, but then there were the two suicide attempts. The former may have healed, but the risk of the latter circles through his convalescence like blood inside a wrist: "If I hadn't kept her out so late, she'd still be alive, wouldn't she?" Every passing train sounds now like a summons, a judgment. He worries his handkerchief between his fingers, knots it unconsciously, obsessively, into the figure of the rabbit that looks threatening when half-tied, pathetic when revealed in full. Long before a murder investigation comes knocking, the close-quarters life of the hotel leaves him continually exposed and imposed on, a wallflower's nightmare. Escaping the lounge where the alum-sweet Mrs. Vinton (Joyce Carey) is used to presiding over a captive coterie of the other guests, he's pursued by her open scorn: "These invalids! Self-pity, that's what it is mostly, pure selfishness . . . I know his kind, I married one." Her cutting chatter runs on through the closed door he has his back to, his telltale handkerchief pressed to his mouth as he tries to get his breathing under control, the entire humiliating scene witnessed by the solicitous manager Miss Selby (Catherine Lacey) from whose hesitant intrusion he flees just as gracelessly. "You're an October man," he's informed by Molly Newman (Kay Walsh), the would-be good-time neighbor who reads him his horoscope over gin and lemon in return for his repairing a blown fuse. "October people are affable, suave, dapper, and have a sense of beauty . . . Above all, they love life." It sounds like a sad joke on a depressive shut-in, but the film is remarkably acute about the way that suicidal ideation can run in tandem with a functional, even an enjoyable life. As wretched as he appears inside the dusk-dim, train-whistled boxes of the hotel, when surrounded by the glass rods and Florence flasks of British Industrial Chemicals there's nothing doubtful about Jim. He's good at his job, to the point where he's credited with most of a new process for synthetic starch. By the turn of spring, he's even begun a relationship with Jenny Carden (Joan Greenwood), the petite but strong-willed sister of the closest thing he has to a friend at work; she greeted him gravely as "the man who never comes to tea," but for her sake he's willing to venture out to restaurants and theaters, the crowds of dance halls and Piccadilly Circus where he can buy her a bunch of daffodils under the approving eye of Alfred Gilbert's Anteros. It doesn't heal him. "It's my head," he explains seriously to Jenny, the night they walk up to the top of the Common and he does not propose to her. "I'm not sure if it's right yet . . . The day I came here, I stopped by the bridge. An express came by and I wanted to fall in front of it. It's something in my mind—a sort of fear—as if it's dangerous to stay alive." We see it in his face even when the trains aren't calling for him, the flickers of strain or shame or apprehension even with someone he trusts. And we see just as well the interest and humor and affection, the quickness of thought that never deserts him even when it's spiraling down unhelpful grooves. It's more believable than if he were unrelievedly demoralized; it's more unstable because neither we nor he know which way in a crisis he will literally jump. "When the fear goes," Jenny promised him with the steadiness of the answer she wasn't asked for, "the danger will go." But when one of his fellow lodgers turns up strangled on the Common, then the survivor's guilt, the terror of facing people and the conviction that they'll know what he's done—all this looks quite different to an already hostile reception and all of a sudden the danger isn't just in his mind anymore.
It is essential to the success of this story that it is not interested in teasing the ambiguity of Jim's guilt. We never seriously suspect him of the murder; we are never intended to. Even before the revelation of the crime scene, we fear something like it from the threat of a shadow in the stairwell, the camouflage of a quick kiss on the cheek, and the film makes little effort to conceal the identity of the person who would benefit most from throwing suspicion onto the obvious scapegoat of the Brockhurst Common Hotel. It has other anxieties on its mind. As candidly as it observes its protagonist's damage, it is equally sensitive to the stigma of being a "mental case." The moment the body is discovered, it's declared the work of a "lunatic," and the moment that Detective Inspector Godby (Frederick Piper) hears the last known address of J. K. Ackland, he believes he's found his man. However badly Jim had it at the hotel before, now he has to endure a ratcheting suspicion with each new application of pressure from the police. In full view of the other guests, they intercept him on his way to a date with Jenny so that the two of them can be questioned separately, the flowers he meant to bring her binned dully after dark. In his absence, the rumor mill primes a bullying stranger to knock him down on his return, so that he has even more questions to dodge as he walks back in, looking twice as disreputable as before. "I think it's disgraceful," Mrs. Vinton sniffs greedily. "Nobody's safe with a man like that about." In the estimation of the unimpeachable Mr. Peachy (Edward Chapman), "They haven't actually arrested him yet, but it's only a matter of hours." Even Harry Carden (Patrick Holt), formerly so hearty and encouraging of his skittish colleague, steps in to prevent his sister from seeing a murder suspect who might be a madman: "You do understand, don't you, Jim?" Of course he understands; everyone knows a man who can't trust his own mind can't be trusted for anything. "They'd call it an uncontrollable impulse," the inspector assures him, as if coaxing a recalcitrant child. "What do you say, old chap? One more statement—the real one, this time?" It's all the same mistake, elementary but devastating. The violence building in Jim under escalating stress is directed strictly at himself. "I'm sorry," he mutters to Jenny after a particularly hopeless outburst, "I'm sorry. I—I try to be reasonable and then I—I get tired and I can't hold on any more." The express train whistles damnation under the bridge and he stares past her into the catalogue of his furies, so flatly delivered they are more distressing than any hysterical breakdown: "You don't know what these things are like. A child without a head and I'm the executioner. A strangled girl and I'm the murderer. The wheels of the—" Attempting to assert his innocence, he ends up begging for reassurance of it instead. It's one of the cleverest—and darkest—twists I've seen on the wrong-man thriller. The suspense is not whether the police will find the right man. It's whether they'll find the right man before an increasingly desperate, self-doubting and disbelieved Jim loses the argument between himself and the railway bridge for the last time.
The nice respectable murderer is a cliché of crime fiction, but in The October Man it goes right to the heart of the point. Conventionally, pop-culturally, as indicated by the gossip of the hotel and the profiling of the police, marginalized, unreliable Jim looks like a murderer—he even looks like the murderer in a film noir. Imagine him played from Jenny's perspective, the attractive, cracked-up stranger with something both innocent and sinister about him. If he were portrayed by James Mason, it'd be even odds on whether he strangled her in the final clinch. When the inspector advances his theory of "a paranoiac . . . not quite responsible for his actions at times," it might well be the real ending of another film. This one knows that depression and anxiety are not synonyms for indiscriminate violence, that a danger to self does not equal a danger to others. Far more likely to kill a girl for rejecting his advances is someone like the successful retired businessman Mr. Peachy, a "respectable quiet type" used to getting his way with status and money, possessive even of people who were never his to begin with. "Middle-class filth!" he sneers of the building where he took lodgings for the exclusive purpose of stalking a girl he liked the look of in the street, on whom he pressed loans she accepted uneasily and attentions she invited even less. "I could buy the place up ten times!" but when he found that he couldn't buy Molly Newman—when she did him the final insult of paying him back his £30, especially with a cheque written by the newcomer she apparently preferred—he choked her to death with her own scarf and set another man to take the blame. He makes his confession to a stunned Jim in the malevolent confidence that even if the little nutter has the guts to go to the police, his accusations will find no more purchase than his denials. "You're insane," Jim murmurs in reflex, and indeed, aggressively fondling a poker with the light slewing across his thick glasses, Mr. Peachy looks as traditionally unbalanced as Jim staring in horror at the handkerchief knotted taut between his fists. The dreadful thing is that he almost certainly isn't, just entitled and armored by it, as unobtrusive and accepted in the life of the hotel as Jim was raw and disruptive: the shadow side hiding in plain sight.
The most important shadows in this picture remain the ones inside its protagonist's head. Justice is done in the end, barely thanks to the police; the evidence sufficient to arrest Mr. Peachy on the verge of flight to sunnier climes is provided by a combination of Jim's last-minute amateur detecting with the contents of a letter posted by Molly herself on the night she died, a posthumous but satisfying revenge. Dramatically and practically necessary as it may be for the hero to clear his name, however, it feels curiously like a secondary consideration. The film doesn't linger on it; it isn't given the climactic treatment. Jim's heroism is ultimately concerned with his decision to survive, to face up to a world that scares him and over and over if necessary choose life. As we always knew it must, the question comes down to the bridge where a thin dark-haired man stands absently petting the ears of his handkerchief rabbit, staring down the stitches of the tracks where the express comes screaming in, its razor wheels racketing flashes of light and dark. For a moment the bridge is empty, curling with smoke like a terrible magician's trick; then it clears and we see him still gripping the riveted steel, gasping with a cat's grin. "I didn't give in," Jim repeats, his arms around Jenny in a kind of wonder; below them on the tracks the handkerchief flutters, torn to pieces like a substitute suicide: "I didn't give in!" It's such a good ending for this story which has cared so delicately and deeply for its shocky, compromised character, fragile and triumphant. Trauma doesn't vanish overnight, the last shot of the near-miss makes sure we remember. But it's still a victory, still richly deserved. Let him be happy. Lots of people with godawful mental health should get to be.
The October Man was written for the screen by Eric Ambler, who doubled as its producer for Two Cities; it does not really seem to be based on a novel of his as sometimes claimed, which bugs me because then I can't read it. It marked the directing debut of Roy Ward Baker, another graduate of the Army Kinematograph Service, and it owes much of its atmosphere of suburban horror to Erwin Hillier, whom I associate with some of the most beautiful black-and-white photography I have ever seen of whirlpools and rain and chalk downs and here does equally stunning and expressionist work with soot-colored streets and underlit parlors, smoke billowing and shadows thickening like all of the protagonist's worst fears about himself. It may be the sole film of its time where life on the outside is grimmer than institutionalization. The daylight scenes in it can be counted on a couple of V-signs. I watched it early in my discovery of John Mills and as many graceful, reliable heroes as I've seen him play since, he may always look definitively to me like a haggard, rather lovely industrial chemist. Eleven years ago, I could discover it streaming on Netflix; I've been waiting for Criterion or Kino Lorber to catch up with it ever since, but the current options look like BFI Player or slightly ad-ridden YouTube. It was worth the inconvenience to see it again. I love it dearly. This kindness brought to you by my sociable backers at Patreon.
"If the world's kind to him during the next few months, he'll be all right." So we are told of Jim Ackland (John Mills) on his discharge from Lufton Hospital following the road accident that gave him a double whammy of TBI and PTSD. He has a new job in London rather than Sheffield. He sets out to meet it with a commendable facsimile of nonchalance. But it doesn't seem a very kindly world that he's re-entering, this little collection of the shabbier end of genteel at the Brockhurst Common Hotel with its everlasting bridge games and its faded hothouse gossip. It might be a microcosm of Britain itself, cruelly magnified—the sea-changed world on the other side of the war, not just disorienting but terrifying. Actually, if Jim could explain his dented nerves as a function of his service record, they might vouch for his normality at least in the sense of having done his bit. For a white-faced man who sweats through social introductions and starts at the sound of his name, who seems to be haunting his room more than renting it and whose easily rattled, easily exhausted demeanor inspires confidence in no one including himself, a year in hospital is a different story even before anyone finds out what kind of hospital it was. Politely excusing himself for a quiet night in with a book, he finds himself publicly reproached as for a personal affront: "That's very unsociable." The worst sin under this burning-glass is not to fit in. But how is a person supposed to fit in who doesn't believe he has any right to be in the world at all?
Especially in light of the number of mysteries that treat the human mind as a grab-bag of plot devices, The October Man stands out not just for the realism of its psychology, but the compassion. Discussing Jim's case with an indifferent claims adjuster, Dr. Martin (Felix Aylmer) acknowledges the irrationality of his patient's guilt with the statement that "an injured brain isn't always logical . . . It may seem easier to take one's life than to go on living," but gives no ground to the suggestion that it must then spring from some preexisting weakness. Anyone can break down, even as practical and rational a figure as "an industrial chemist, intelligent and quite sane." The accident which serves as the film's prologue fully justifies the condition in which it leaves its protagonist. It recurs as it might in his memory, in slices of near silence like a bad dream: the night bus swaying, the storm-wet road, the bolt rattling loose in the rain-dashed wheel, the little girl clasping her toy rabbit in her arms as Jim transforms his handkerchief into a little rabbit-dolly of his own, the steam-throated scream of the train at the crossing, the spin-out, the stricken faces, the headlights that smash into the oncoming bricks horribly long before the bus and its passengers do. The child was killed in the crash, not prettily. Jim got off with a fractured skull, but then there were the two suicide attempts. The former may have healed, but the risk of the latter circles through his convalescence like blood inside a wrist: "If I hadn't kept her out so late, she'd still be alive, wouldn't she?" Every passing train sounds now like a summons, a judgment. He worries his handkerchief between his fingers, knots it unconsciously, obsessively, into the figure of the rabbit that looks threatening when half-tied, pathetic when revealed in full. Long before a murder investigation comes knocking, the close-quarters life of the hotel leaves him continually exposed and imposed on, a wallflower's nightmare. Escaping the lounge where the alum-sweet Mrs. Vinton (Joyce Carey) is used to presiding over a captive coterie of the other guests, he's pursued by her open scorn: "These invalids! Self-pity, that's what it is mostly, pure selfishness . . . I know his kind, I married one." Her cutting chatter runs on through the closed door he has his back to, his telltale handkerchief pressed to his mouth as he tries to get his breathing under control, the entire humiliating scene witnessed by the solicitous manager Miss Selby (Catherine Lacey) from whose hesitant intrusion he flees just as gracelessly. "You're an October man," he's informed by Molly Newman (Kay Walsh), the would-be good-time neighbor who reads him his horoscope over gin and lemon in return for his repairing a blown fuse. "October people are affable, suave, dapper, and have a sense of beauty . . . Above all, they love life." It sounds like a sad joke on a depressive shut-in, but the film is remarkably acute about the way that suicidal ideation can run in tandem with a functional, even an enjoyable life. As wretched as he appears inside the dusk-dim, train-whistled boxes of the hotel, when surrounded by the glass rods and Florence flasks of British Industrial Chemicals there's nothing doubtful about Jim. He's good at his job, to the point where he's credited with most of a new process for synthetic starch. By the turn of spring, he's even begun a relationship with Jenny Carden (Joan Greenwood), the petite but strong-willed sister of the closest thing he has to a friend at work; she greeted him gravely as "the man who never comes to tea," but for her sake he's willing to venture out to restaurants and theaters, the crowds of dance halls and Piccadilly Circus where he can buy her a bunch of daffodils under the approving eye of Alfred Gilbert's Anteros. It doesn't heal him. "It's my head," he explains seriously to Jenny, the night they walk up to the top of the Common and he does not propose to her. "I'm not sure if it's right yet . . . The day I came here, I stopped by the bridge. An express came by and I wanted to fall in front of it. It's something in my mind—a sort of fear—as if it's dangerous to stay alive." We see it in his face even when the trains aren't calling for him, the flickers of strain or shame or apprehension even with someone he trusts. And we see just as well the interest and humor and affection, the quickness of thought that never deserts him even when it's spiraling down unhelpful grooves. It's more believable than if he were unrelievedly demoralized; it's more unstable because neither we nor he know which way in a crisis he will literally jump. "When the fear goes," Jenny promised him with the steadiness of the answer she wasn't asked for, "the danger will go." But when one of his fellow lodgers turns up strangled on the Common, then the survivor's guilt, the terror of facing people and the conviction that they'll know what he's done—all this looks quite different to an already hostile reception and all of a sudden the danger isn't just in his mind anymore.
It is essential to the success of this story that it is not interested in teasing the ambiguity of Jim's guilt. We never seriously suspect him of the murder; we are never intended to. Even before the revelation of the crime scene, we fear something like it from the threat of a shadow in the stairwell, the camouflage of a quick kiss on the cheek, and the film makes little effort to conceal the identity of the person who would benefit most from throwing suspicion onto the obvious scapegoat of the Brockhurst Common Hotel. It has other anxieties on its mind. As candidly as it observes its protagonist's damage, it is equally sensitive to the stigma of being a "mental case." The moment the body is discovered, it's declared the work of a "lunatic," and the moment that Detective Inspector Godby (Frederick Piper) hears the last known address of J. K. Ackland, he believes he's found his man. However badly Jim had it at the hotel before, now he has to endure a ratcheting suspicion with each new application of pressure from the police. In full view of the other guests, they intercept him on his way to a date with Jenny so that the two of them can be questioned separately, the flowers he meant to bring her binned dully after dark. In his absence, the rumor mill primes a bullying stranger to knock him down on his return, so that he has even more questions to dodge as he walks back in, looking twice as disreputable as before. "I think it's disgraceful," Mrs. Vinton sniffs greedily. "Nobody's safe with a man like that about." In the estimation of the unimpeachable Mr. Peachy (Edward Chapman), "They haven't actually arrested him yet, but it's only a matter of hours." Even Harry Carden (Patrick Holt), formerly so hearty and encouraging of his skittish colleague, steps in to prevent his sister from seeing a murder suspect who might be a madman: "You do understand, don't you, Jim?" Of course he understands; everyone knows a man who can't trust his own mind can't be trusted for anything. "They'd call it an uncontrollable impulse," the inspector assures him, as if coaxing a recalcitrant child. "What do you say, old chap? One more statement—the real one, this time?" It's all the same mistake, elementary but devastating. The violence building in Jim under escalating stress is directed strictly at himself. "I'm sorry," he mutters to Jenny after a particularly hopeless outburst, "I'm sorry. I—I try to be reasonable and then I—I get tired and I can't hold on any more." The express train whistles damnation under the bridge and he stares past her into the catalogue of his furies, so flatly delivered they are more distressing than any hysterical breakdown: "You don't know what these things are like. A child without a head and I'm the executioner. A strangled girl and I'm the murderer. The wheels of the—" Attempting to assert his innocence, he ends up begging for reassurance of it instead. It's one of the cleverest—and darkest—twists I've seen on the wrong-man thriller. The suspense is not whether the police will find the right man. It's whether they'll find the right man before an increasingly desperate, self-doubting and disbelieved Jim loses the argument between himself and the railway bridge for the last time.
The nice respectable murderer is a cliché of crime fiction, but in The October Man it goes right to the heart of the point. Conventionally, pop-culturally, as indicated by the gossip of the hotel and the profiling of the police, marginalized, unreliable Jim looks like a murderer—he even looks like the murderer in a film noir. Imagine him played from Jenny's perspective, the attractive, cracked-up stranger with something both innocent and sinister about him. If he were portrayed by James Mason, it'd be even odds on whether he strangled her in the final clinch. When the inspector advances his theory of "a paranoiac . . . not quite responsible for his actions at times," it might well be the real ending of another film. This one knows that depression and anxiety are not synonyms for indiscriminate violence, that a danger to self does not equal a danger to others. Far more likely to kill a girl for rejecting his advances is someone like the successful retired businessman Mr. Peachy, a "respectable quiet type" used to getting his way with status and money, possessive even of people who were never his to begin with. "Middle-class filth!" he sneers of the building where he took lodgings for the exclusive purpose of stalking a girl he liked the look of in the street, on whom he pressed loans she accepted uneasily and attentions she invited even less. "I could buy the place up ten times!" but when he found that he couldn't buy Molly Newman—when she did him the final insult of paying him back his £30, especially with a cheque written by the newcomer she apparently preferred—he choked her to death with her own scarf and set another man to take the blame. He makes his confession to a stunned Jim in the malevolent confidence that even if the little nutter has the guts to go to the police, his accusations will find no more purchase than his denials. "You're insane," Jim murmurs in reflex, and indeed, aggressively fondling a poker with the light slewing across his thick glasses, Mr. Peachy looks as traditionally unbalanced as Jim staring in horror at the handkerchief knotted taut between his fists. The dreadful thing is that he almost certainly isn't, just entitled and armored by it, as unobtrusive and accepted in the life of the hotel as Jim was raw and disruptive: the shadow side hiding in plain sight.
The most important shadows in this picture remain the ones inside its protagonist's head. Justice is done in the end, barely thanks to the police; the evidence sufficient to arrest Mr. Peachy on the verge of flight to sunnier climes is provided by a combination of Jim's last-minute amateur detecting with the contents of a letter posted by Molly herself on the night she died, a posthumous but satisfying revenge. Dramatically and practically necessary as it may be for the hero to clear his name, however, it feels curiously like a secondary consideration. The film doesn't linger on it; it isn't given the climactic treatment. Jim's heroism is ultimately concerned with his decision to survive, to face up to a world that scares him and over and over if necessary choose life. As we always knew it must, the question comes down to the bridge where a thin dark-haired man stands absently petting the ears of his handkerchief rabbit, staring down the stitches of the tracks where the express comes screaming in, its razor wheels racketing flashes of light and dark. For a moment the bridge is empty, curling with smoke like a terrible magician's trick; then it clears and we see him still gripping the riveted steel, gasping with a cat's grin. "I didn't give in," Jim repeats, his arms around Jenny in a kind of wonder; below them on the tracks the handkerchief flutters, torn to pieces like a substitute suicide: "I didn't give in!" It's such a good ending for this story which has cared so delicately and deeply for its shocky, compromised character, fragile and triumphant. Trauma doesn't vanish overnight, the last shot of the near-miss makes sure we remember. But it's still a victory, still richly deserved. Let him be happy. Lots of people with godawful mental health should get to be.
The October Man was written for the screen by Eric Ambler, who doubled as its producer for Two Cities; it does not really seem to be based on a novel of his as sometimes claimed, which bugs me because then I can't read it. It marked the directing debut of Roy Ward Baker, another graduate of the Army Kinematograph Service, and it owes much of its atmosphere of suburban horror to Erwin Hillier, whom I associate with some of the most beautiful black-and-white photography I have ever seen of whirlpools and rain and chalk downs and here does equally stunning and expressionist work with soot-colored streets and underlit parlors, smoke billowing and shadows thickening like all of the protagonist's worst fears about himself. It may be the sole film of its time where life on the outside is grimmer than institutionalization. The daylight scenes in it can be counted on a couple of V-signs. I watched it early in my discovery of John Mills and as many graceful, reliable heroes as I've seen him play since, he may always look definitively to me like a haggard, rather lovely industrial chemist. Eleven years ago, I could discover it streaming on Netflix; I've been waiting for Criterion or Kino Lorber to catch up with it ever since, but the current options look like BFI Player or slightly ad-ridden YouTube. It was worth the inconvenience to see it again. I love it dearly. This kindness brought to you by my sociable backers at Patreon.
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Huh! It looks like the same writer did a similar edition of Powell and Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going! (1945). I would love to see those.
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Thank you! I am glad to share things to think about.
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Thank you! I really don't know why the film isn't better known.
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I hope you enjoy it!
(If useful to you, I discovered after posting this review that the film is also available on the Internet Archive, in what looks to me like slightly worse condition, but in compensation doesn't make you sit through ads.)
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we see just as well the interest and humor and affection, the quickness of thought that never deserts him even when it's spiraling down unhelpful grooves. It's more believable than if he were unrelievedly demoralized; it's more unstable because neither we nor he know which way in a crisis he will literally jump. --exactly that.
And the difference between THAT and a person who kills out of aggrieved privilege is so big. I like that this film lifts that up. The people with aggrieved privilege--they're the ones to fear.
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It's just a treasure. I actually think I took it more for granted the first time I saw it. It wasn't that I couldn't differentiate its understanding of mental health from films like Spellbound (1945) where psychoanalysis might as well be sympathetic magic—and I recognized it at the time as an exemplar of the noir ability to address social issues without solidifying into a message picture—but in 2011 I had seen much less film noir and so I had seen much less of the pulp-psych strain of it, e.g. there I was watching Backfire (1950) and all of a sudden the cute mortician played by Dane Clark turned out to be the alter ego of a maniacally murderous gangster. The October Man is having none of that. It also uses very little psychiatric language, which stands it in good stead seventy-five years later. In their last interview before Jim leaves the hospital, his doctor reminds him to take things slowly at first, cut himself a lot of slack, and not make any major life decisions immediately. "You mean there's a good chance of a relapse," Jim says sharply. "Not necessarily," the doctor responds, not taking the bait. "If you came to me with a broken leg, I'd say don't play football." That kind of neutral comparison is not uncommon now, but in 1947? Good for Dr. Martin. Good for Eric Ambler.
The truth of what you say and the film describes: that you can be functional and even happy and yet still drawn to end things--this I know from people close to me.
And the film understands that healing is not a binary or necessarily even a linear process, when so many narratives treat it like a switch that just needs to be flicked back on. Jim needs support from people, whether it's the unconditional, unsentimental reality checks he gets from Jenny who never doubts him and refuses to collude in his spirals ("You're not the murderer. And you know who is and you've got to stop him") or the diffident kindness of one hotel guest who doesn't entirely agree that being a nervy, antisocial sort makes a man fair game for railroading. He pulls himself together to play last-minute amateur detective with admirable tenacity, carrying off more than one level-headed confrontation and, ironically, some very successful lying when he actually sets his mind to it. He still crashes—more than once and badly—when the internal and external pressures combine to the apparent inescapable truth that he can't be trusted and should be dead. He's the only person who can keep himself alive. The film thinks he's worth it and doesn't pretend it's as simple from his side as being loved or even cleared of all charges. That was important for me to see in 2011. It's still important now.
And the difference between THAT and a person who kills out of aggrieved privilege is so big. I like that this film lifts that up. The people with aggrieved privilege--they're the ones to fear.
Absolutely. I almost certainly find Mr. Peachy scarier these days.
no subject
This reminds me of a conversation I was having with my dad about literature that tries to portray things as they are rather than according to type (... the conversation felt more nuanced than that bald statement, but to generalize broadly). This film is doing the former. (Whereas some of the others you mention seem to be doing the latter thing, and apart from the fact that no real person is a type, there's also the problem that types themselves go in and out of fashion--and recognizability.)
And what you say about thinking Jim's worth it: that means so much to me. People are worth it. They don't have to be X-amount good or brave or smart or persevering to qualify as worth it. I love a film (or a story) that can care about them as they are, and invite us to care too.
no subject
Yes. That matters so very much.