No Mel or Sarah this week, so the boys have been left unsupervised with the Talking Pictures TV schedules. What could possibly go wrong? With three weeks of cinematic treasures to choose from, Scott, Hal, Daniel and this week's host, Gareth, have each been rummaging through the listings in search of something they think deserves a place on your watchlist. Scott has selected Tomorrow at Ten, Lance Comfort's cracking 1963 British thriller starring John Gregson, Alec Clunes and a splendidly sinister Robert Shaw. Shaw plays Marlow, a kidnapper whose scheme involving the young son of a wealthy businessman comes with a particularly nasty ticking deadline. John Gregson is the detective faced with finding the boy before time runs out. Lean, tense and running at around 80 minutes, it is the sort of economical British thriller that gets on with the job without feeling the need to hang around for another half-hour explaining itself. Daniel, meanwhile, has gone for Green for Danger, Sidney Gilliat's marvellous 1946 murder mystery set in a wartime hospital during the Blitz. When a patient dies on the operating table, the arrival of Scotland Yard's Inspector Cockrill, played with enormous relish by Alastair Sim, suggests that something rather more sinister than medical misfortune may be involved. Trevor Howard, Sally Gray, Rosamund John and Leo Genn are among the suspects in a film adapted from Christianna Brand's novel and combining a proper murder mystery with a wonderfully dry streak of British humour. And apparently one Alastair Sim film wasn't enough. Hal has selected The Green Man, the gloriously dark 1956 comedy in which Sim plays Harry Hawkins, an outwardly respectable watchmaker who has found a rather more lucrative sideline as a professional assassin. Unfortunately for Hawkins, his latest carefully arranged murder keeps being interrupted by George Cole's enthusiastic vacuum cleaner salesman. Add Terry-Thomas, Jill Adams, Raymond Huntley, Dora Bryan, Arthur Lowe and Richard Wattis to the proceedings and you have ninety minutes of beautifully controlled comic chaos. Directed by Robert Day and written by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, it also gives this week's choices a neat little connection with Green for Danger. Finally, Gareth has decided that Britain simply isn't big enough for him this week and has gone continental with Georges Franju's extraordinary Les Yeux sans visage, better known as Eyes Without a Face. Made in 1960 and starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli and Edith Scob, Franju's French horror classic concerns a brilliant surgeon desperately trying to restore the face of his disfigured daughter. Unfortunately, his chosen method of doing so makes even the most questionable private cosmetic clinic look reassuringly respectable. Beautiful, eerie and genuinely unsettling, it mixes fairy-tale imagery, medical horror and dreamlike black-and-white photography into something that still feels strikingly modern more than sixty years later. So that's four films, two Alastair Sims, one psychopathic Robert Shaw, a professional hitman, a deeply worrying surgeon and a vacuum cleaner salesman. Just another perfectly normal week at The Official Talking Pictures TV Podcast.
