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This fabulous film – broadcast on Talking Pictures – is (should be more…) famous for its last shot, a 1st-person POV shot of someone dying! Yes, really! You see the light fading until it just makes a little red circle in the middle… and then it’s: THE END.
Made by Cineguild – a brief British United Artists-style production outfit in the 40s – it was supposed to be a big-budget version of the period melodramas popularised by Gainsborough (The Wicked Lady, 1945) – except in glorious Technicolor! It was shot by the dream team (presumably in sequence, not at the same time) of Guy Green (who had just won an Oscar in 1947 for Great Expectations, later a not-very-good director of The Magus, 1968, etc) and Geoffrey Unsworth (who stayed a DP and later shot 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, and Tess, 1979).
It was produced by Anthony Havelock-Allan, best remembered for 4 David Lean movies. (And in fact DL would contribute a film to this Victorian-murder sequence with the excellent Madeleine, 1950 – tho in b&w.) AH-A intended the film to be a present for its leading lady – and his wife – Valerie Hobson, who 4 years previously had given birth to a son with Down’s Syndrome. As shown in The Spy In Black (1939) and Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949), Hobson’s got ‘it’ (no Choice involved). Her finest role came, however, in real life when – having divorced AH-A, she married John Profumo! (But that’s another…)
Alongside VH – the upwardly mobile governess – is the biggest British star of the day, Stewart Granger, who’s great when he’s playing nasty, as the resentful and (ultimately) murderous stable manager of the Furies… And also such Brit mainstays as Michael Gough (later Alfred for Tim Burton) and Maurice Denham (The Day Of The Jackal, 1973, etc).
It was based on a novel by ‘Joseph Shearing’, who was actually a woman, Margaret Campbell, who also wrote the novel of Under Capricorn, among (under various pseudonyms) 150 others…
It was adapted by Audrey Lindop (also known as Audrey Erskine-Lindop) and – one of only 2 credits, with Great Expectations – Cecil McGivern.
As director, they brought over – a touch of class – a French director, Marc Allegret, whose fame as a film director has been eclipsed by his youthful association with Andre Gide. Marc’s younger brother, Yves, directed (also in 1948) Un Si Jolie Petite Plage, an unforgettable film-noir seaside nightmare starring Gerard Philipe, which was – believe it or not – the kind of film BBC2 still screened in the 80s…

Blanche Fury was the sort of film broadcast on Channel 4 on 25 April 2003, when – by complete chance, as the rain poured down – I put it on after my wife had come home from hospital, having that afternoon given birth to our son Alex… I’ve never forgotten it.

An excellent Brit film noir, directed by Lewis Gilbert, screened on Talking Pictures (the stroke victim’s friend…).
Based on a novel by Richard Macaulay (screenwriter of Born To Kill/Lady Of Deceit, 1947, and The Roaring Twenties, 1939), moved from America to England, hence the large amount of Americans in the cast (USAF etc).
The (equally excellent) screenplay was by Vernon Harris, who had a long-lasting relationship with Gilbert, writing Cosh Boy (1953) and Carve Her Name With Pride (1958), among others, and being script editor on Gilbert’s not-very-good Bond movies The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979). The idea being – presumably – that a spot of script editing would improve on Gilbert’s 1st and WORST Bond movie, You Only Live Twice (1967), which in Sean Connery’s Japanese impersonation post-dated even Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961) – surely the WORST PERFORMANCE OF ALL TIME!
(Gilbert’s quite good as a director, tho, in Damn The Defiant, 1962, for instance…)
The Good Die Young’s based on 4 couples, the men of whom meet in the pub.
Laurence Harvey (who’d already made 2 Lewis Gilbert quota-quickies) plays the homicidal, gambling-addict, ‘war hero’ (tho it’s all been faked) son of Sir Robert Morley, and is married to heiress Margaret Leighton, who just wants to start again in Keeeenya. Harvey’s role eerily prefigures – in the medal that was wrongly given, and in his utter hatefulness – his best role, the would-be assassin in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).
John Ireland (Red River) plays a USAF serviceman who’s married to unfaithful starlet Gloria Grahame (at 30, on fab form, before her strabismus got too much…).
Stanley Baker, on his way out of the ranks, plays an ex-boxer who gets his left hand amputated (NOT his right. Lucky him! But still, as a disabled man he just HAS TO DIE FIRST!) and is married to someone who defiantly remained unfamous (Rene Ray, who doesn’t even have a photo in IMDb!).
And Richard Basehart (who the same year starred in Fellini’s La Strada) is another American married to Joan Collins (who had starred the previous year in Cosh Boy and was Gorgeous, at the age of 21…), who’s torn between him and her leech of a mother (Freda Jackson, of A Canterbury Tale fame).
Apart from anything else, it acted as a calling card for Hollywood, for its British stars (or Lithuanian in the case of Harvey). The following year, Collins was in Land Of The Pharoahs, and the year after that, Baker was in Helen Of Troy AND Alexander The Great…
It’s a great picture of male/female relationships, c1954.
It’s a bit like Heat (1995) in this respect: showing the heisters’ relations with their partners. And in another: during the raid, it’s Harvey’s trigger-happy behaviour that undoes them. (Did Michael Mann see The Good Die Young? Maybe he went to the NFT while he was at the London International Film School…?)
The climax, involving pursuit down the tube tracks, is good. And for an ending – involving money blowing away at Heathrow Airport (while Margaret Leighton, oblivious, boards the plane for Keeeenya…) – is a direct precursor of The Killing (1956).
Which begs the question: is The Good Die Young the missing link between Stanley Kubrick and Michael Mann?

My ‘rock music’ memory is basically – compared to a lifetime of ‘rock memories’ for you – only the 3–year period 1979 till the end of Rhine River 3 (the Golf Club gig – our last, I think – was in January 1982). Thereafter I deliberately ‘got into jazz’…

Why I turned my back on rock music was totally to do with Joy Division: no-one else was ANYTHING LIKE as good! So after a couple of years of trying, I thought ‘grown-ups don’t listen to rock music’ – and turned my back at 18…

It was only when Alex prematurely got into the Beatles (about 2011) that I thought again. What had I been thinking of? Pop music was GREAT! (And some jazz too…) Now, thanks to Spotify, I’ve got my one playlist of 500+ tracks, and it’s growing…
You have always been someone who just ‘tells it how it is’. In the 90s, you just wrote that letter to me at Premiere saying ‘how are you?’ And – though I was glad – I also thought it was weird, somehow… There was just NO REASON to do it! But post-stroke, as I see it now, there‘s just no reason NOT to do it! As my mind came back to me, I thought: Why on earth not…?

I realised my whole reluctance to do anything without a reason was basically inculcated by my mother, who I now think is somewhere ‘on the spectrum‘. (As am I…) She doesn’t have a sense of humour and is quite incapable of empathy. I don’t say that to blame her, just out of interest – for curiosity‘s sake. (Well, I probably protest too much…)

Some things she taught me turned out to be good. That obsessive list-making quality came in handy with my gig list…

Michael Caine’s second-best movie – and one of about 20 ‘old films’ owned by the BBC, and as a result screened so often that I know it by heart.
The title means: Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned REflex with StresS.
Harry Saltzmann had produced 3 Bond movies and in the year of the 4th, Thunderball, chose to go upmarket to Bond’s downmarket with this adaptation of Len Deighton’s 1962 spy novel.
He used the same composer, John Barry, who has never been better. The soundtrack is jazzy and involves Bartok’s favourite instrument, the Hungarian cimbalom (a sort of zither).
While in the novel the protagonist is first person and isn’t given a name, in the film (and its sequels, Funeral In Berlin, 1966, and Billion Dollar Brain, 1967) he is Harry Palmer. He’s an INFINITELY more interesting character than Bond: he is working-class, a cook, listens to Bach and Mozart (the occasion for a great, raised-eyebrow look from Nigel Green as his secret-service superior, Major Dalby. Green, the year after his Colour Sergeant Bourne in Zulu – also with Caine, has his best role ever.)
AND Palmer wears glasses, horn rims; the film includes a shot taken from his POV of the glasses being taken off and the image going out of focus.
The writers are of an almost J Wrathall-like obscurity: W H Canaway (aka Bill) was a novelist who only wrote one other screenplay, Sammy Going South (1963), adapted from his own novel; and James Doran, a TV writer (Z Cars etc) who only wrote this one screenplay. But they do an excellent job, junking Deighton’s plot, much of which is set in Lebanon, to focus on London. It’s one of the great London movies – despite the director, Sidney J Furie, being Toronto born, the son of Polish immigrants.
It’s brilliantly framed. Whatever happened to the director? (The cinematographer, Prague-born Otto Heller, was good – he also did Peeping Tom, 1960 – but at 69 wasn’t in the market for something quite so outre…) As an impressionable 18-year-old, I made a note of Furie’s name, sure to come across him again.
But – apart from The Leather Boys (1964) and a ten-minute burst of The Appaloosa (1966), with M Brando having a bad wig day (not to be confused with Ed Harris’s Appaloosa, 2008) – I’ve never seen another of his films.
I noticed he’d directed Superman IV (1987, IMDb rating 3.7) AND Iron Eagle IV (1995, 3.3), which apart from making him a quartet specialist, hardly seemed to promise much.
What went wrong?
He was born in 1933, made his directorial debut in 1957 and was STILL WORKING at 81: witness his 2014 film Pride Of Lions, with the Superman/Iron Eagle double of Margot Kidder AND Louis Gossett Jr.
Which means he at least keeps in touch with his stars…

I went to school with Robin Russell, the second son of the Marquess Of Tavistock, who was in turn the son of the Duke Of Bedford (who owns, among others, Bedford Street, Covent Garden, home of the brand-new Z Hotel and the Actors’ Church…).
I think it was 1973, which would make me almost ten. We moved out of the school into a synagogue while building work has done. We used to take packed lunches and Robin and I used to drink instant coffee in a thermos – very good taste for ten-year-olds, I’m sure you’ll agree… The other thing we had in a thermos (and it must have been his idea, because I’ve never really liked it, before or since) was Campbell’s tinned consommé…
It was my first (of 2) experience of hanging out with an aristocrat. We shared an interest in horse racing. His father owned racehorses; my father bet on them.
He was nice. I was aware of his wealth. One time, we were fooling around on Primrose Hill, where we were supposed to be playing football. (Not my forte: I used to count the times I touched the ball. That was enough. I never even got close to scoring a goal…) He was upset because he’d lost his pen; not a biro or a Pentel, you understand – a gold-plated Parker…
I thought: Why HAVE a gold-plated Parker in the first place? Pentels write just as well, and you don’t have to go crazy when you lose them…
He disappeared from my memory about that time. Maybe I got moved up a year? (I think he was in the same form as Spottiswoode…) Or maybe he went away to boarding school? I suppose he ended up at Eton or Harrow, with the Toms and the Benedicts…
The internet reveals as little as possible about him now. Other than the fact that he seems to be still alive.
His maternal grandmother was Joan Barry, the original Hitchcock Blonde. She was in Blackmail and Rich And Strange (which I remember as being weird and good, and not your typical Hitchcock…) And she was Robin Russell’s grandmother! Infinitely more exciting than the Duke Of Bedford…

My second time hanging out with an aristocrat was about 2 years later, at the same school (The Hall, Belsize Park; it must have been quite a posh school…).
Brer, Viscount Ruthven Of Canberra, was the son of the Earl Of Gowrie who – his son told me – liked Physical Graffiti! (The Earl Of Gowrie was later Arts Minister under Margaret Thatcher, in the days when the holders of that job actually LIKED art…)
I was only in his class for 1 term (I had to wait till I was older before going to big school). He’s recently been in court for throwing his 19-year-old girlfriend into the street (he’s 54). He was out of control even then. His parents were divorced. Oddly, his mother (who wrote a memoir my mother said was good) lived in a house next to Primrose Hill, overlooking the avenue of trees where Robin lost his Parker. And she still does. Xandra Bingley is her name. And on the Andrew Marr stroke documentary on the BBC she owns the room to which he walks – across Primrose Hill – and PAINTS.

Both Marr and Russell Senior had strokes! I wonder if they know that? Or is it a degree too far?

Crops up from time to time on Film4.
The only crime movie (that I’ve seen…) by William Dieterle, Weimar actor (in Murnau’s Faust) and, later, Hollywood director, famed for The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1939, with Charles Laughton) and Portrait Of Jennie (1948). This was towards the end of his career; later in the 50s he went back to Germany.
William Holden is the cynical but crusading journalist from the wrong side of the tracks who is best mates with the DA (Edmond O’Brien) but uncovers secrets involving the DA’s veteran policeman father. (Holden and O’Brien we’re together again in The Wild Bunch, 17 years later…)
The triumvirate is completed by Alexis Smith, as the DA’s Girl Friday who transitions from O’Brien to Holden. She’s Canadian and a bit like Jane Greer, only classier. You might just remember her from Night And Day (1946), as the ‘wife’ of Cary Grant/Cole Porter. What happened to her? She went back to the theatre and made a hit of Stephen Sondheim ‘s 1968 musical Follies, and also appeared in Dallas.
The story is pretty good, from an original by the great Horace McCoy, who wrote the novel of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and the screenplay for The Lusty Men (also 1952; clearly a good year…), among others.
It builds to a climax at a boxing match which shows Dieterle hasn’t lost his touch – and ends (appropriately for him) in tragedy. The hitman is played by Neville Brand, a mainstay of this sort of movie (Riot In Cell Block 11, 1954).

I had the stroke on 26 July 2013.
From then till late August, I was cared for – as well as they could – by Colchester Hospital…
From late August till 1 November, I was cared for (AWATC…) by the Regional Rehabilitation Unit at Northwick Park Hospital…
From 1 November till 8 April 2016 (2 years and 5 months), I was cared for by Katy (AWASC…) – till she just couldn’t stand it anymore…
From 8 April 2016 till 9 March 2018 (1 year 11 months), I was cared for by my mother (AWASC…) – TSJCSIA…
On 9 March 2018, I returned to Mistley and threw myself on the mercy of humanity…
That was a GOOD MOVE…
Because 8 DAYS LATER, Laura reappeared on the scene (after 27 years…) and I was cared for (insofar as I need to be) by HER…
8 months later, it seems to be going well… 😏😏

(Thanks to the ex-bfi person who sent me this film, which is available free at: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-life-in-her-hands-1951-online)
A training film that lasts 55 minutes and has as its lead an actress who 2 years earlier was capable of far better stuff. Which isn’t to say this is devoid of interest. Far from it (tho I’ll leave the analysis to someone else…).
It stars Kathleen Byron, dramatically less pale and interesting than she was in Black Narcissus and The Small Back Room. For starters, she has – like all the most attractive women in Britain (including Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron and my mum) – that ‘national health’ short hairdo, seemingly done by a blind old lady, and permed to within an inch of its life… (The 80s was arguably even worse in terms of female AND moreover male haircuts, mine included…)
What was it about the 50s in Britain? The Red Shoes gave way to – in P&P terms – The Battle Of The River Plate. Rationing went on and on, after the celebrations for the Festival Of Britain (also 1951) ceased. There were such glorious American movies and male fashions – and such TERRIBLE female ones.
KB was actually 30, tho playing a 24-year-old. Her dead husband (called, as my father is, Dick) is (or looks to be) at least 50, and smokes (in the photo by her bedside) A PIPE! And, while we’re on the subject, why on earth is she driving when her husband is sitting in the passenger seat? Is he disabled? Is he radically modern, for 1951, just letting his wife drive? Surely a better movie (one less concerned with establishing ‘guilt for husband’s death’ – ✔️) would make something of this?
The film was the directorial debut was Philip Leacock, whole films look too boring even to see (in my 40 years’ viewing), but who did have a younger brother, Richard, who was big in documentary.
It has a lot to say (inadvertently) about women in the 50s. They’re all so goddamned CAREFUL. It was as if the last 3 decades (since 1918) had been about liberation. It was time to put the lid back on. The doctors are ALL MEN (and one Christmas kissing scene with the nurses shows what to us is pretty vile sexual harassment). It’s basically on the level of a Harry Enfield Mr Cholmondeley-Walker sketch. (The scenes with KB’s brother directing plays at the Watfield Playhouse are particularly grotesque.) And why on earth is no mention made of the NHS, then only 3 years old, and surely a matter of great pride? SO MANY QUESTIONS…
But the cast is great, despite everything.
Jenny Laird (Sister Honey in Black Narcissus) is the matron.
Joan Maude (the Chief Recorder in Black Narcissus) is STILL KB’s boss, as the Sister Tutor.
And KB still looks dangerous in her close-ups, tho the film overall marks the beginning of a long, slow ‘declivity’ (to borrow Albert Goldman’s phrase) – which something like the Janet McTeer/Vita Sackville West BBC miniseries Portrait Of A Marriage (1990) eventually did something to reverse.
My mum was 13 when this came out; my dad, 21, had ‘done’ National Service for 18 months (as an officer in the Black Watch!) and was just about to go ‘up’ to Cambridge… Hmmmm.

Congratulations on Ryan’s Guardian piece. Expertly done, against the clock, it’s an attempt to link the two. But I must take issue with the use of Performance to illustrate a point about Nicolas (look, no ‘H’) Roeg.
Performance, surely, was 90% Donald Cammell’s work. He WROTE THE SCRIPT – a not insignificant factor – and directed, until Roeg – who knew a thing or two about cinematography – helped out with the direction.
Ditto Roeg’s ‘radical reinvention’ of film theory – stolen/borrowed ENTIRELY from Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968), on which Roeg was DP – is totally a British invention. Forget the American, a Brit THOUGHT OF IT FIRST! Well, actually, he didn’t. Lester did, and Roeg – a gifted imitator, as all DPs have to be – ‘borrowed’ it for his work on Performance, and – hey presto – a new career as a director was born…
Sure, all filmmakers have the ‘gifted imitator’ thing inside them. Film directing is (basically) a charlatan-like profession (as all screenwriters know) – and none the worse for it. Roeg was a gifted imitator (and also a gifted pornographer; ditto – none the worse for it) and he crafted a good-ish second career as a director, as some DPs do. 
Certainly, his directorial career was a lot more assured than, say, Jack Cardiff (and Roeg’s DP career was less extraordinary. Nobody will make a Roeg DP doc like they did in Cameraman, which is available FOR FREE on YouTube). Roeg did – as all good DPs do – what his director told him (or could tell him). Cardiff, by contrast, was the official only Technicolor DP in Britain, and did more or less what he liked for ten years, from Black Narcissus (1947) to The Vikings (1958, by RICHARD FLEISCHER!). Thereafter he tried to become a (from what I’ve seen TERRIBLE) director (of, amazingly, 14 films!). Eventually, the message got thru and he became a fine DP again, only of anything, from Rambo: First Blood Part II (I always loved that title – and DETESTED the film…) to Conan The Destroyer(Fleischer again…).
Roeg made Don’t Look Now, which was a very subtle and scary horror film. But in basically 5 or so close watchings over 35 years, his ‘Julie Christie’s pregnant’ thing TOTALLY ELUDED me – and, I bet, 99% of the audience. Does ANYONE get it before they’ve read Roeg saying: ‘ah, or course Julie Christie’s pregnant!’ If it’s so crucial, why on earth didn’t he make more of it? Or was it just a case of – on his 2.1nd film – directorial incompetence? Did he think of it later, after the shoot, and try to ‘rationalise’ the whole irrational film in interviews?
I saw Bad Timing (1980) several times when a virgin, and thought it brilliant. But – when I’d actually HAD sex, and realised it could be extraordinarily FUN – I thought: Is Bad Timing REALLY what he thought about sex? No, he’s a charlatan (natch) who just thinks it’d be amusing to make a downbeat pic. (He ALWAYS made downbeat pics, a sure sign of the charlatan. Ingmar Bergman, it seems, was very amusing in person. So WHY ON EARTH didn’t he put amusement in his pics? Because – natch – he’s also a charlatan who thinks: It’ll be better box-office if I always make them DEPRESSING…)
Roeg had sex with Theresa Russell (28 years his junior) and cast her in many more films (and in Aria, 1987, as a bloke – he was kinky too!). So, presumably, the sex was good, n’est-ce pas? But NOT in Bad Timing (which always struck me as a joke, as in the German for bath: Bad as in Marienbad, or Bad Colberg, or Bad Frankenhausen etc…). It’s set in Vienna – Bad Luxury – isn’t it?
For the rest, Roeg’s films were all failures (and commercial failures too). I ‘only’ watched till Heart Of Darkness (1993), when the scales fell… Still – ten plus films seen for one good movie – that’s good enough… (For a charlatan…)
And why do people – who’ve never met him – ALWAYS describe him as ‘Nic’. Just to show off their French spelling? It says ‘Nicolas Roeg’ in the credits of the movies, so why not give him that?
Nicolas Roeg (1928-2018), DP, a good (tho imitative) director and (equally good) pornographer, about on the same level as Tony Scott. RIP