No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948)

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) is a scandalous British psychopath crime thriller film noir in which Limey actors adopt fake American accents as the Brits attempt to create a mock film noir styled thriller based on the most widely read British novel of World War Two.

St John Clowe’s 1948 adaptation of No Orchids for Miss Blandish is and does remain and is the remains of what was once a pivotal yet polarising entry in British cinematic history of film noir, that Limey Noir history we all crave, from the 1940s and 1950s. Based on James Hadley Chase’s sensational novel, the film was a bold attempt to replicate American-style gangster noir within the constraints of British cinema. 

The Seventh Veil (1945)

The Seventh Veil (1945) is a variety of woman’s film. 

This may sound dismissive but the so-called 'woman's picture' is a sometimes unacknowledged genre from in particular the 1940s, a similarly themed series of films which focus on the mental health of domestic, middle class women. 

Often the women in these films are prisoners, either physcial or mental, or as here ― both. 

Because of this, these heroines are also generally quite paranoid.

You can tell The Seventh Veil is one such ‘paranoid woman film’ because of how it opens ― a woman in a sick bed. 

It’s Ann Todd (playing Francesca) and she is in the traditional pose of the ‘sick’ woman, in a bed, asleep one second, and the next frighteningly alert to the disturbances of her mind. 

It doesn’t matter necessarily that this bed is in a sanatorium ― these beds are just as often in houses, generally creepy, weird houses, but domestic situation nonetheless.