Three Films Make A Post: The girl you've been waiting for

The Unheard (2023): Other people’s mileage apparently varies considerably, but I had a lot of fun with Jeffrey A. Brown’s thriller about the auditory haunting of a deaf girl (Lachlan Watson) during and after an experimental procedure to regain her hearing. The whole “person encountering ghosts while regaining a formerly lost sense” thing is of course less than original, but the script by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen is tight, Brown’s direction solid, and Watson’s performance effective and likeable, so I didn’t mind this lack of originality in the least.

Whipsaw (1935): This melodramatic crime romance by Sam Wood about an undercover cop (Spencer Tracy) and a thief (Myrna Loy) he is attempting to pump for information about her colleagues in crime going on the road together is a surprisingly fun little thing, living off the considerable chemistry between Tracy and Loy – not something I would have expected going in, though Loy apparently had the ability to spark off everyone if she wanted to – and a sense of melodrama that never becomes too sappy or kitschy. There’s what feels like genuine heart to the story, so much so that, even under the conservative hammer of the Hays code, the cop seems to learn as much from the thief as she from him. That the film manages to contrive a way to not punish Loy’s character for past misdeeds and points at a happy end is an additional pleasant surprise.

Battle in Outer Space aka Uchu daisenso (1957): Leave it to the great Ishiro Honda (and of course writer Shinichi Sekizawa) to make a film about a space war between Earth and a superior alien force that have made their base on the moon to not go for the jingoist vein but emphasise the importance of international togetherness. It’s till rather refreshing; and a bit uncomfortable in that it makes a space war movie feel somewhat utopian.

If that alone doesn’t float your boat, you also get some wonderful miniature work from Eiji Tsuburaya and company, an ever wonderful Ifukube score, goofy yet awesome science, and even a bit of the old “mind-controlled by the alien menace!” paranoia. Though most of the latter could have been avoided if the powers that be had put any effort at all into guarding their heroic astronauts from alien abduction. But what can you do?