BAFTA Film Award |
| Best British Costume (B/W) |
Patricia Neal is a blind married woman, who's a victim of hysterical blindness, a term for blindness that is caused by psychological reasons, instead of anything really wrong with the eyes. It seems she was traumatized by something and refused to see things the way they really were.
Psyche 59 is directed by Alexander Singer and adapted to screenplay by Julian Zimet from the novel written by Francoise des Ligneris. It stars Patricia Neal, Curd Jurgens, Samantha Eggar, Ian Bannen and Beatrix Lehmann.
I am admittedly biased after seeing her in "The Subject Was Roses", an incredible achievement by Patricia Neal. That being said, this film "Psyche 59" deals with Neal and her seemingly caring husband Curd Jurgens (always believable as middle-aged man, malcontent).
Obviously based on a novel (and on a novel by a woman too)! I saw this film on TV forty years ago and remembered only the menacing conversation the heroine has with her mother, but that was sufficient to make me want to take another look at it again.
Allison Crawford is blind, though there's nothing physically wrong with her eyes. What did Allison see that was so shocking it mentally snapped her vision closed?
As had so often been the case in the past the best thing about Alexander Singer's "Psyche '59" is Walter Lassally's luminous cinematography. This British drama revolves around Patricia Neal, blinded in an accident but aware that her blindness is psychosomatic and not physical.
PSYCHE 59 is a film I really struggled with. It's posited as a blind-woman-in-peril thriller, and even B-movies in that particular genre are pretty good and enjoyable; it says something that they're still making them even now, long after they first gained popularity in the 1950s.
With the death of Patricia Neal this month (August 2010), I took some time to research her life, past the obvious facts I had known about: i.e.
This is one of the most boring pretentious films I have seen in a long time.It is the sort of film that would drive away what little audience was left in cinemas in 1964.
