Psyche 59

Obviously based on a novel (and on a novel by a woman too)! I saw this film on TV forty years ago and remembered only the menacing conversation the heroine has with her mother, but that was sufficient to make me want to take another look at it again.

Having enjoyed enormous critical acclaim a couple of years earlier with 'A Cold Wind in August', Alexander Singer blew all the clout he'd gained with that freak success in this elaborate, breaktakingly pretentious folly about the love lives of the fabulously wealthy; and found himself condemned to spend the rest of his career in television. But 'Psyche 59' has awarded him the last laugh, it exists!!

A weird hybrid of 'The Miracle Worker' and 'The Pumpkin Eater' (both of which ironically starred Anne Bancroft, who replaced Patricia Neal when she nearly died following a series of debilitating strokes while filming '7 Women' in 1965, barely a year after she'd won an Oscar for 'Hud'). Had Ms Neal died this film would probably be better remembered today, and it would certainly make it an even more vivid experience to watch than it already is. She wears a succession of fabulous outfits devised by Julie Harris plus a pair of those chic sunglasses that blind people always do in the movies, the photography by Walter Lassally is stunning, and the restless score by Kenneth V. Jones creates a similar mood to that his music lent soon afterwards to Roger Corman's 'The Tomb of Ligeia'. Definitely a film to be watched at least once.