Where There's a Will, I Want to Be in it

Films: Sudden Fear
Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.

NetFlix is a lot like an umpire or autocorrect. When it does its job well, you don’t notice it. It’s only when it screws up that we really pay attention to it. Umpires, autocorrect and NetFlix all take more crap than they should because of that. What this means is that yes, I have a complaint about NetFlix. Sudden Fear has disappeared from its available discs. What this means is that I looked for it online and found it at DailyMotion. I appreciate it being there; I didn’t appreciate the ads every five minutes for much of the running time.

Sudden Fear feels like a movie I should have seen years ago. It’s a film noir, and I love film noir. It’s also a damn good film noir. It’s stylish and slick, and while there are certainly elements like a good femme fatale, this is very much a “woman in danger” film. In fact, since our main character is being threatened with death over the contents of her will, it’s entirely about her being in danger and finding a way to survive it.

Ward Seven

Film: Captain Newman, M.D.
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I fully intended to watch something on DVD today that I had picked out from a local library. However, when the film started locking up a couple of minutes in, it was time for plan B. Plan B for me generally consists of something saved on the DVR or something I’ve found online. The problem with the online films is that in many cases, these are movies that no one knows. Show of hands—how many of you have even heard of Captain Newman, M.D.? One…two…maybe three. Maybe. And I find that really interesting because this is one of those forgotten films that has a cast that indicates it should be far better known than it is.

Captain Newman, M.D. is a mixture of drama and comedy similar in many respects to a film like Mister Roberts despite taking place in a hospital rather than on the deck of a ship. And without as much aggression from superior officers. The titular captain, Josiah “Joe” Newman (Gregory Peck) is the head psychiatrist at a hospital in Arizona during World War II. It’s his job to rehabilitate pilots and air crew who have what we would today call PTSD or something similar. It’s a job he’s greatly conflicted with because he realizes that many of those men that he puts back into the service will eventually come home in a coffin.