While I Live

I remember seeing this film on TV as a boy in the late 50s/early 60s and have never forgotten it. Very powerful with wonderful music. The image of a sleep-walking woman on the cliffs sticks with me after 40 years.Would love to see it again, but for some reason it isn't regarded as Classic enough for release on DVD. Why doesn't someone release the theme tune as a single with clips from the film on the accompanying video? It worked for 'Love is all around me'... Have sometimes toyed with the idea of writing to Total Film and submitting candidates for the Top 100 British films which they never seem to mention, such as this and some of the best George Formby and Gracie Fields films. When I was a boy they were often on TV. Why aren't they now?

This film is only 80 minutes long, and yet it makes an impression of being at least 20 minutes longer. Although the action is mainly talk, the intrigue is so crowded with important questions of existence and identity, that the metaphysical issues and problems here almost burst the limits of the dimensions, especially that of time. The first part of the film happens in 1922, when a young oianist and composer (female) happens to a mortal accident, leaving her last compositiion unfinished. The rest of the film happens 25 years later and provides a tremendous intricacy of an existential experiment. The phenomenon can't just be brushed aside, as Christine tries to do away with it, but even if the problem ultimately is resolved by logic and rational therapy, the phenomen and experiment must remain as an unanswered question. You need to se this film several times and will probably still not quite understand it, as there are too many aspects on it to be fathomed and grasped at once, and even if you see it again and again, there will remain unanswered questions. This is a metaphysical phenomenon and nothing else, and only the old,Cornish gardener is competent enough to treat it the right way. It's one of the three great English musical films of the 40s, the others being "Dangerous Moonlight" (with the Warsaw Concerto) and "Cornish Rhapsody" with Stewart Gramger and Margaret Lockwood as the pilot and the pianist. They are all three unique and remarkable for their unsurpassed musical psychology, and this film is actually basically most about the mental strain of a pianist and composer who happens to be a woman. The risk is that you will find the film more fascinating and interesting every time you see it again.

Compared to today's line-readers sometimes called, "actors," this cast is first-rate. A bit corny, perhaps, but so is Gone With the Wind. The film hit a nerve with 1947 audiences who were dreaming their war dead might return. Watch it with that thought in mind and you'll shed tears.

The film keeps replaying and replaying Charles Williams' "Dream of Olwen" a perhaps little too much, but I don't tire of it. For over 50 years, "Dream of Olwen" has been one of my favorite musical pieces. Not until recently did I learn that it came from this film.

The young amnesiac woman who visits on the night of the 25th anniversary of the death of Julia's sister, Olwen, brings too many coincidental similarities to Olwen. The story is an wonderful original mystery tale.

I have to disagree with all the other reviewers.Unfortunately this nothing but melodramatic tosh which because of its slightly spiritualistic theme was popular with audiences after the war since they were still grieving for those lost in the war.This film actually makes Madonna of the seven Moons seem to be a work of the realist school.The acting is rather hammy,Tom walls with his mummerset accent is particularly bad.The production generally poor and the script is just a laugh a minute.Every possible cliché of this type of film is piled on.Much as i love films of this era i have to say that i just found it to be preposterous nonsense but suited to the audience that viewed it.

Like another reviewer on this board, I can't help but go against the grain and describe this film as tosh: moody, well-shot tosh perhaps, but tosh nonetheless. It has a nice bit of piano music in it which keeps popping up time after time, and the usual distinguished performances we see from British actors in the 1940s, but that's about it.

WHILE I LIVE has an arresting opening sequence which climaxes in a woman dropping off a Cornish clifftop. Years later, folk in the ancestral home question whether a mysterious young woman who has mysteriously arrived at the property is in fact the reincarnation of the dead woman. Yes, it's one of those melodramas with a spiritual edge, made as a result of the massive loss of life in the Second World War (just as WW1 heralded another mini-boom in spiritualism).

Sadly, WHILE I LIVE doesn't offer much in the way of mystery or depth, and after a while all of the brooding and endless dreamy moments become more than a little tiresome. I'm the sort of person who looks for incident in a film, whatever its type, and there just isn't enough of it here.