As a result of a house-move in this last couple of months I had to switch broadband providers to BT, getting a BT YouView box in the process. A major discovery in this respect has been the channel, Talking Pictures TV, which would appear, also, to be a Freeview channel, but I tried it at my brother's house (on Freeview) in the same town and the signal was none too brilliant - the picture breaking up all over the place - so that might be the reason why it has, hitherto, passed me by.
I was surprised that - according to one of the reviews here on IMDb.com - this film has been on BBC, since TPTV seems to be showing all manner of films I have never previously seen on TV. Maybe it should again, to give this gem some wider exposure (to use suitably photography-related vocabulary!) than it might garner on TPTV.
Under what other set of circumstances (apart from at Christmas 2004, on the BBC, evidently!) can one get to see, on British TV, Ida Lupino's first-ever full-feature other than at 6.00 am, on a Saturday morning, on TPTV?
While the plot may, at times, be a little corny, given the production values on show, with a change in fashions, cars and locations one could almost imagine one were watching a film from the classic 'Noir' period of Post-WWII America (by which time Ida Lupino would have been a 'name' in the States) rather than Pre-WWII Britain. Furthermore, the fact that the name 'David Lean' is mentioned in the credits as 'Editor' probably gives the game away that there is great talent of the future at work here.
If the reader of this review will forgive a slight personal indulgence in this context, with my late father having been brought up on a farm in the 1930s (I have a photo of him on his father's tractor as a very small boy) it was fantastically evocative to see, in 'The Ghost Camera', a cinematic portrayal of a scene at a farm in the Britain of the Early-1930s. It really brought Dad's childhood to life.
It is almost unreal to think that this film would probably have come from a time before he would have had a clear recollection of Global events!
