davidvmcgillivray-24-905811 Review of The Eyes

The Eyes (1960 TV Movie)

Seemingly unbroadcast pilot may be director Ken Hughes's first credit

[1/10 · 4 November 2022]

One of the oddest films to turn up on the Talking Pictures channel is this failed TV pilot, possibly never broadcast until now. The channel's website claims it dates from 1960, but the film plainly has a 1951 copyright date. It was shot in a couple of corners of the Merton Park studios and looks incredibly cheap. It was aimed at US tv: it has US-style ad breaks, one after the prologue, and the cast is either American or pretending to be. That prologue features two eyes disembodied in a black space (a couple of decades before the disembodied mouths in Beckett's play "Not I" and of course "The Rocky Horror Picture Show") and seems to promise something much more sinister than what we get, a feeble spin on Patrick Hamilton's play "Gaslight". A "hysterical" woman (Jean MacDonald) is patronised by two men - her husband and doctor - who are of the opinion she's losing her mind. The doc believes the husband's claim she's trying to kill him. But the unfaithful blighter is gaslighting her in the hope that she'll be put away and that he can go off with his mistress. The ending, including a knife murder, is badly-handled by director Ken Hughes. But the newly-discovered film becomes his first credit as director and this counts for something. He made his feature debut with "Wide Boy" the following year.