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By words that just hang in the air and stories that aren't going anywhere
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.
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Your TV guide has unique tastes.
I once did a thing about 1950s comedy that involved me rewatching Cabby a lot, and I'm still very fond of it.
It's the most human, which we were not expecting, and it was a battle of the sexes from 1963 that didn't flame out in misogyny, which was perhaps even more of a surprise. It felt like an outlier within the cycle to me, but extremely worth being fond of.
Also, btw, I don't know if you have seen this, but I am currently watching a thing off Talking Pictures called The Assassination Bureau and it has Diana Rigg trying to stop the Assassination Bureau by hiring them to assassinate their own chairman, Oliver Reed, and then she has to tail him to report on it & they have basically been running all over early 1900s Europe blowing everything up behind them and accidentally starting WWI in the middle.
I've heard of it, actually, because it was one of the last collaborations of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph, but I never have seen it! Did it survive the last twenty minutes?
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Yes, exactly. Once the 70s get all contemporary again, there are some echoes of it scattered through them, but only Cabby goes full on kitchen sink. But, then, that was Britain in 1963 for you! XD It is the only battle of the sexes thing I will watch! XD
I've heard of it, actually, because it was one of the last collaborations of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph, but I never have seen it! Did it survive the last twenty minutes?
THERE WAS AN AIRSHIP!
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Right; I must see this.
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