By words that just hang in the air and stories that aren't going anywhere

[sovay]

I cannot say that I am going to town on the free channels of the Roku, because as of late I have been so exhausted that I am watching fewer movies than usual, but I am fascinated by TVTime because it gives me access to a remarkable number of British films which have been otherwise difficult to impossible to find—noirs, musical comedies, the aforementioned quota quickies—so long as I am willing to watch them at a quality that gives pirated media a bad name. It reminds me of the early days of Netflix and YouTube and I keep expecting to discover one evening that it's all been pulled on grounds of massive rights sketchiness, but in the meantime it's enabling me to pursue several avenues of exploration that until now had obliged me to wait on the hazards of Criterion and TCM and once upon a time the local arthouses. I am still out of luck on a couple of particular titles, of course, and I am dead out of luck when it comes to finding a couple of source novels in my local library, which would be less annoying if I could find them on my local internet. I'm not entirely sure what I'm researching and am not asking for suggestions, but I'll report back if it resolves into anything more complicated than comparative literature. If nothing else, I had never thought of John Mills as a noir-identified actor like Eric Portman or James Mason, but I've just seen him in a second example after The October Man (1947) and there's at least a third on my radar. I suppose when you are a national archetype, it's an unavoidable phase.

Comments

[sovay]

The Third Secret is a thing that I found very interesting/weird/good in several ways, but was not at all sure what to make of ultimately, but it was specifically made by director Charles Crichton in response to seeing Psycho and so I'd be very curious as to what you'd make of it, because you would have more context for the conversation it's part of.

Okay, that does sound fascinating, and I wish I had an icon of Anthony Perkins to deploy for this conversation. I will make what I can of it when I find it.

It's 1960s psychological-thriller, too, which obv comes with its own warning, but it's also really interesting and the central relationship between a murdered psychiatrist's teenaged daughter (Pamela Franklin) and the TV reporter who is also one of her father's patients (Stephen Boyd) was the real selling point.

Luckily or tragically, I have had to develop a reasonably high tolerance for terrible movie psychology in order to watch several of the genres I really enjoy. I do like Pamela Franklin. (I don't dislike Stephen Boyd, I have just seen him everything from very good to apparently unable to act his way out of a paper bag which is out-acting him. Your recommendation of this movie optimistically suggests the former.) I'm just sorry so much of it was cut. And not in a decade when the footage is likely to be recovered, either.

[thisbluespirit]

I have never seen Stephen Boyd in anything, and the details of this are hazy now - but certainly he and Pamela Franklin were very compelling together, so probably!