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Blind Spot (1947) was unobjectionably winding up its 73 minutes of inessential Columbia B-noir and then it stuck its middle-aged character actors with the emotional landing and I was obliged to have feelings about it.

Thanks to a screenplay which regularly fires off such pulp epigrams as "Yes, but why should dog eat distinguished writer?" Blind Spot never actually bores, but it has little beyond the acridity of its literary angle to differentiate it from any other lost weekend noir when critically esteemed and commercially starving novelist Jeffrey Andrews (Chester Morris) comes off a double-decker bender to discover that his disagreeable publisher has been iced in exactly the locked-room fashion he crashed around town shooting his mouth off about the previous night and worse yet, he can't even remember the brilliant solution that made his pitch worth more than the pair of sawbucks he was condescendingly packed off with. "It's like falling off a log. Dangerous things, logs. More people get hurt that way." Smack in the frame of a crime he may even have committed in a time-honored vortex of creativity and amnesia, he renews his ambivalent acquaintance with Evelyn Green (Constance Dowling), his ex-publisher's level-gazed secretary who would have had work-related reasons of her own to entertain a three-sheets stranger's foolproof gimmick for murder, but with a second corpse soon in play and a policeman pacing the shadow-barred sidewalk above his basement efficiency like a guard down the cell block already, the two of them take their slap-kiss romance as much on the lam as the rain-sprayed studio streets will allow until the complicating discoveries of a check for $500 and a gold spiral earring pull their mutually suspicious aid society up short. Since everyone in this film reads detective fiction with the same frequency as offscreen, the levels of meta flying around the plot approach LD₅₀. "The only thing this proves is that I'm slightly moronic."

So far, so sub-Woolrich. The supporting cast may not be any less stock, but at least their detailing is more inventive than the hero's blear o'clock shadow or the heroine's demi-fatale peek-a-boo. Sarcastically spitballing a detective for his easy-peasy crime, Jeffrey proposed Jeremiah K. Plumtree, an eccentric old New Englander with the lovable habit of forgetting to unwrap his caramels before eating them. Instead he gets the decidedly uncozy Detective Lieutenant Fred Applegate of the NYPD (James Bell), one of those dourly hard-boiled representatives of the law whose wisecracks even sound like downers, the lean lines of his face chilled further by his crystal-rims. Even when he straightens up into an overhead light, he looks mostly annoyed at the shadows it sets slicing through his third degree, a thin, plain, dangerous plodder. "That's right. With an M." Naturally, his narrative opposite is the effusive Lloyd Harrison (Steven Geray), a cherubically flamboyant sophisticate with an honest-to-Wilde carnation in his buttonhole who deprecates his own best-selling mysteries with the modesty of the luxuries he can afford because of them, shaking himself a cocktail at a wet bar that could host the Met Gala. His Hungarian accent lends an eerily psychoanalytic air to the scene where he talks Jeffrey through recovering the blacked-out solution of his story, one of its few expressionist touches. "Small was the worst kind of a stinker. And a pair of shears in his back? Well, as the saying goes, on him it looks good." They make such an odd couple meeting over the trashed files and splintered locks of the crime scene that when the writer opens with the arch observation, "The cops must really love to wreck a place," we half expect to learn that the lieutenant ran him in once for some aesthetic misdemeanor or other and instead Applegate cracks the first smile we've seen out of his burned-in cynicism and then tops it by folding himself down at the murdered man's desk, conceding his mystification with the case, and even submitting to be teased self-reflexively by Harrison: "Only amateurs can solve a crime. You've read enough mysteries to know that." It's no caramel, but around a clearly old friend he has an odd, thoughtful tongue-in-cheek expression he closes his mouth on the second he catches himself being noticed. He chews on the ends of his glasses, too. It makes him look downright human.

( You forget the solutions must be completely logical as well as acceptable by the reader. )

Blind Spot was the scripting job of novelist and screenwriter Martin Goldsmith who had already penned the budget-free noir legend Detour (1945) and would pick up an Oscar nod for the equally second-feature The Narrow Margin (1952) and it shares their flair for creatively tough dialogue, even when its rhetorical saturation occasionally tips over from the enjoyable to the inexplicable, e.g. "Possibly it was the heat which the rain had done no more than intensify, which drained a person's vitality like ten thousand bloodthirsty dwarves." Its economical direction was the successful debut of former child actor Robert Gordon, but like so many B-pictures it draws as much or more of its tone from its photography, in this case by George Meehan who opens with a fabulous track down a working-class, washing-hung street of litter and pushcarts that could almost pass for a naked city, shoots his leading lady like abstract sculpture in the dark, and just for good measure throws in some subjective camera for an unfortunate run-in with a chair. I watched it off TCM at the last minute and am distressed to report the almost unwatchably blurred-out grunginess of every other print the internet seems to offer, not to mention their badly clipped runtimes; it hampers the ship manifesto. Pace the indeed memorably weird moment where Morris essentially faceplants into Dowling, muzzily nuzzling into her platinum waves like a soused, stubbly cat, I cannot care that much about obligatory het even when it comes with left-field chat-ups like "I was afraid you were going to turn out to be frivolous—order one of those exotic cocktails like crème de menthe with hot fudge." James Bell absentmindedly twiddling an important piece of evidence is more my line. This theory brought to you by my distinguished backers at Patreon.

Tubi had begun to endanger its status as an unrelieved treasure of free weird cinema earlier this fall when it suddenly disappeared two otherwise hard to come by movies of interest to me before I could recover enough from my hospitalization to write about them, and the recent appearance of an obtrusive encouragement to sign in at the start of each stream had not thrilled me, but then tonight I discovered that in the grand total of five nights since spatch and I last rummaged through its digital shelves the service had turned account-only. Without one, the most I was offered of any movie was a fifteen-minute preview. With one, its catalogue remains purportedly free—though presumably still in need of a hard adblock—but it had always been a huge attractor for me that in addition to resembling the experience of browsing the remoter regions of a video store where the schlock and the art films were all jumbled together, the service did not have to track its users. I never created an account. I enjoyed it not knowing what to recommend me. Any data the internet does not successfully scrape from me these days feels like a victory. Rob has offered to create effectively a burner account for me so that I do not lose access to some movies I had intentions of trying to write about, but I am feeling much more dejected about them and about the further algorithmic constriction of the world, besides which their equally recent, randomly mid-month deep-sixing of their library of classic Doctor Who makes it not impossible, but once again harder for me to rewatch Vengeance on Varos (1985) in memoriam Nabil Shaban. I am aware that far worse disasters are on constant rotation. But I just had my other social media nuked for not allowing it to extort my biometrics and I just had to wrestle my word processor back from the grip of unasked-for AI and I enjoyed being able to point people toward the occasional film that, region-dependent, they could just dial up and watch without it filing their history away for future advertisement. I just heard from my health insurance that it will cost even more in the coming year and it is already functionally unaffordable, except that I have too many specialists I can afford even less to lose. It just does not feel necessary for anything to be more difficult, even the unprofitable watching of B-movies for fun.

I rarely see movies like Mark Jenkin's Enys Men (2022). More often I dream them.

A sort of double hat trick for its writer-director-cinematographer-editor-composer, it could as easily be described as the ecology of a haunting. In post-synched 16 mm as brilliantly saturated and scratchy as home movies, the woman whom even the credits identify only as the Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) moves through the ritual of her days on a small island off the westernmost coast of Cornwall where she seems to have been stationed as the observer of a clump of rare flowers, nodding their stiff white petals and bright red pistils at the edge of the sea-cliff whose soil temperature she meticulously records in her logbook along with the date and the customary observation No change. Each time she climbs the loose-bedded step-stones to the cold chimney of the abandoned tin mine, she drops a stone down the drowning black of the shaft just to hear the distant, ricocheting splash. Each time she returns to her slate-shingled, ivy-striped cottage, she fires up the petrol rale of the generator and makes herself a cup of tea while the lucky dip of her cream-colored Dansette breathes through static as if through storm. If the near-total isolation troubles her, she doesn't show it, an elfin figure in her middle fifties with a barely silvered shag of brown hair and a wry weather-grained face, characteristically layered in her white seaman's jumper and red rain jacket and jeans as blue as her Atlantic eyes. Roaming the island between duties, she seems as self-sufficient as her candlelit bedtime reading of Edward Goldsmith and Robert Allen's A Blueprint for Survival (1972). Periodically she receives supplies and wall-banging sex—she bakes him saffron buns—from the rugged, just as namelessly credited Boatman (Edward Rowe), but no other presence seems as important as the standing stone she crosses in her daily transit of the island, its angular hunch eclipsing her from view so that she seems to pass through rather than behind it. The woodcut in her cottage depicts it ominously rooted among ribs and skulls, but its silhouette seen from her front door suggests rather a cloaked, skirted figure proceeding at tectonic speed. In her dreams, perhaps, it comes like a guiser to her door. The film lingers with animate richness on such details of the natural world, the yolk-flowered tremble of gorse in the sea-breeze, the swing of a black-blacked gull above the ledges, the lichen everywhere scaling and tufting the old walls and outcrops of the stone of the island's name. It lingers the same on apparently unnatural ones, the ring of bal maidens stamping the earth like the engine-clank of the old workings, the miners whose smutched faces peer out at her from beneath the candle-melted brims of their hats, the ruined church clean and whitewashed, its altar piled with branches of flowering hawthorn. What narrative emerges from the sparsely worded script is done with chimes and discontinuities, refrains and layers as reliable as any residual haunting. Actually, however mystifying, contradictory, folded, spindled or mutilated it may look, it is time in this movie that doesn't lie.

Much more of a tone poem than a puzzle for the viewer, Enys Men inhabits with ambitious directness its nonlinearity that another film might have been tempted to treat more trickily, observing effects before causes and explanations before questions as though there were no more ordinary way to exist in time. On the one hand, some kind of progression can be tracked in the dates of the logbook, the growth of lichen, the wear and tear on a pair of brown walking boots whose brave red laces are part of the film's primary rhyme of colors. On the other, persons attempting to pinpoint the break in its objective hour and a half will be peeved. Time on this island has always—when has it ever done anything else, anywhere—gone strange. As incongruous as her modern, transient figure appears against the immemorial spaces of wind and moor and wave, the Volunteer should be regarded as no less a part of their accumulated fragmentation of personal history with history of place, the history of Cornwall that renders a quizzical joke out of the earnest check-in, "Do you like it here on your own?" She couldn't get a layer of time to herself if she tried with so much of it underfoot in the flaking rust of old rails, a brand name of tinned skimmed milk. Her cottage's history wakes her with the coughing of the burly Miner (Joe Gray) who borrows one of her books to read on the toilet like any careless flatmate before collecting his pick and hammer for a day's work that by his clothes must have gone off shift before the First World War. Its future ghosts in with the teatime broadcast, tinnily exploding any meaningful sense of a present that seemed as factual as her thin strong hand pencilling in 21st April 1973 when the memorial it describes has stood for "nearly fifty years," the harbor-set cenotaph of a loss at sea scheduled for "the 1st of May 1973, near the old miners' quay on the abandoned island of Enys Men." From their rag-white ribbons and stockings, the children who sing daleth an hav with a drum and sprays of newly broken may-blossom are older in the island than the crew of the late nineteenth century lifeboat who grin still dripping with the sea that drowned them, but behind them the cottage is a gape-roofed, ivy-tumbled ruin, as long uninhabited as it might be explored to this day. At its door in her nightdress as when, face to face with the standing stone on her threshold, she juddered like a frame of gate-stuck film, the Volunteer calls, "Who's there?" She has already been answered. The dark-haired, impassively adolescent Girl (Flo Crowe) perches like a cormorant on the cottage's glass-roofed shed, her corduroys white and her cardigan blue so that a viewer may wonder where the red will come in. The Preacher (the late, great John Woodvine) in his clerical black and white bands addresses her with the solemn injunction of a maritime hymn, the Bible under his arm glistening like the mica-misted granite of the menhir at his side. Picking over the jumbled crags of the shore with their verdigris stains and sunbursts of orange sea-lichen yields a bloodied oilskin and a paint-cracked plank, the foretellings of once and future tragedy. "Are you there? Hello? Can you hear me?" Time isn't even looping so much as it's free-associating, cross-linked even more obviously than a VHF transmission we hear from both ends of the airwaves. Now it folds on a single point, the lace-and-thorn christening of the Baby (Loveday Twomlow) whose addition to the company of the Girl and the Volunteer lends a sort of pitch-shifted triple-goddess vibe to the slowly remembered singing of Philip Paul Bliss' "Let the Lower Lights Be Burning" in which the Preacher with his aged rock of a voice leads them. Now it merely reverses, an upward glitter of water in the flooded mine. Above all, it seems to be bending toward the event horizon of May Day, a painful double entendre when the failed rescue of the supply boat Govenek scores the date through from 1897 to 1973, but earth is as powerfully commingled with sea in the changeover as they always have been in the ore-riddled, salt-girt life of Stone Island. Lichen has appeared on one of the flowers, the Volunteer records for the first time in the last days of April, before discovering a grey-green frill of her own in the white scar that twists across her stomach. The lichen has grown on the flower, thickening over the seam of her skin like the coat of the standing stone. Her entries stop like a clock: The lichen has spread to all of the flowers. No change. No change. No change. Its proliferation suggests its own explanation for the haunting, if that's even beginning to sound like the right word for a process as natural as reclamation or grief: a new organism created by the symbiosis of the human and the land. How should it surprise us to see the Volunteer presently step out of the menhir as if leaving the house on her usual rounds? The earth, like the body, keeps the score.

Enys Men was one of the few movies I was able to watch last summer when I had functionally ceased to sleep and was in no state to say anything about it except perhaps to have likened it to the film of a novel never written by Alan Garner or suggested that when Scarristack of Greer Gilman's Cloud gets its film industry up and running, it might produce cinema like Jenkin's. Like a descendant of Powell and Pressburger, it has all the ingredients of folk horror arranged to much more numinous than jump-scaring effect, the enmeshment of memory with the land that does not so much return the repressed as hold it in trust. The sound design is compact with anachronism, both in the sense of cues and voices bleeding back through the picture and the persistent reminder that the AM radio seems to be tuned to the twenty-first century, its local news and football scores cut with Brenda Wootton's "The Bristol Christ" (1980) and Gwenno's "Kan Me" (2022), which is incidentally the credits music. The hand-processed film flares and flickers like an unrestored rediscovery, washing nature and spirit photography alike with neg sparkle and the occasional vinegar-red flameout. Sifting its symbol-set of recurrent images and phrases for a key feels beside the point when so much of the movie exists in multiplicity—even the standing stone has a stunt double, its original being Boswens Menhir—and its makers' resonances may not be mine, but its tactile, liminal landscape is live with them. I thought: We have become stone in the stone. Earth mastered us. I thought: But everywhere in the room, that morning, there was a great mess of little twigs and leaves, hawthorn leaves, and rowan. And everywhere a great smell of the sea. I got it from Kanopy, but in the right region it can be viewed on BFI Player or Blu-Ray/DVD and it streams on all the usual suspects. I may not know enough about lichen to be its ideal audience, but I do care enough about time. This year brought to you by my own backers at Patreon.