“The Hypnotic Eye” (1960) — Part II — The Images

Sev­er­al years ago, I start­ed col­lect­ing any­thing I could find regard­ing the movie “The Hyp­not­ic Eye”. I was suf­fi­cient­ly intrigued about the movie that I want­ed to know every­thing about it, and one way was to get as much para­pher­na­lia about it togeth­er that I could.

I would even­tu­al­ly col­lect two of the pub­lic­i­ty pack­ages, con­sist­ing of news­pa­per arti­cles, infor­ma­tion and ads, one each for both US and British release, which were print­ed on very flim­sy newsprint and so were dif­fi­cult to sur­vive. I also have what I think is a com­plete col­lec­tion of the pub­lic­i­ty stills released for the movie, many com­plete with the descrip­tive text attached to the back. But the biggest addi­tion to the col­lec­tion was a diskette I received from Gil Boyne which con­tained a num­ber of pho­to­graph­ic stills tak­en from when he was on the set of the movie. Many of these images were nev­er used in any pro­mo­tions and most were in col­or, where­as the pub­lic­i­ty stills were all black&white.

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Two Weekends, Two Conventions

The following has nothing to do with the overall subject of the blog yet everything to do with the continual maintenance of the owner of the blog. The past two…

“MM!”

Prac­ti­cal­ly every­one in this show has some kind of men­tal hangup, and that’s the focus of the series.

For the three main char­ac­ters, they all have full-grown psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­ders that con­flict and coop­er­ate at the same time. The male lead Tarou is a masochist, but only when women do the dam­age; Mio is a sadist and, in clas­sic ani­me style, is self-con­scious about her flat breasts; and Arashiko of the abun­dant breasts can­not stand being touched or even being around men and will even attack them if they get too close. There­fore, Tarou is in ecsta­sy when Mio or Arashiko hit him, and they do, a lot, as Mio gets inor­di­nate plea­sure from doing so where­as Arashiko does so when flus­tered or by acci­dent and is imme­di­ate­ly sorry.

Its also the run­ning joke, that Mio is always try­ing to find ways to ‘cure’ Tarou’s masochism (includ­ing an can­dle-lit exor­cism) that always wind up rein­forc­ing his masochism instead of cur­ing it. Of course, one of those ways involves hypnosis.

The rest of the cast all have their hangups as well: Tarou’s moth­er and teen-aged sis­ter are extreme­ly over­ly affec­tion­ate toward him (both want to mar­ry him) and even com­pete with each oth­er (and his girl­friends) for his affec­tions; Tarou’s friend Tat­su­kichi is a cross-dress­er (and quite good at it) and seems to have an alter­nate per­son­al­i­ty emerge when dress­ing as a woman; Noa, a senior, although her appear­ance is still that of a younger girl, is a genius who nev­er had a child­hood as she had to study all the time, and who always refers to her­self in third-per­son; Noa’s assis­tant Yuki­no­jō is a major loli­con (fan of pre­pu­bes­cent girls) and joined the Inven­tor’s Club to be clos­er to Noa; and school nurse Michiru knows all about every­one’s hangups, pos­sess­es an appar­ent­ly unlim­it­ed sup­ply of cos­play cos­tumes and loves to take pic­tures of the stu­dents in them.

Need­less to say, the entire series is NSFW.

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“Love, American Style”

Video ID not provided: Please check your shortcode.

TV series like this don’t usu­al­ly sur­vive: an anthol­o­gy series based on a sin­gle top­ic (in chse, love in all its accept­ed forms of the day) with­out a cen­tral char­ac­ter or actor (except for the ever-present ornate brass bed) usu­al­ly don’t have the abil­i­ty to car­ry an audi­ence. “Love, Amer­i­can Style” sur­vived for five sea­sons and for many years after­ward in syndication.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063925/[

And as usu­al­ly hap­pens with long-run­ning come­dies, there will be at least one (in thie case, two) sto­ries involv­ing hypnosis.

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“The Woman in Green” (1945)

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038259/]

[amtap amazon:asin=B0000EMYI1]

In “The Woman in Green”, a mys­te­ri­ous mani­ac is ter­ror­iz­ing post-WW II Lon­don: inno­cent women are being mur­dered and their right fore-fin­ger is being care­ful­ly removed. Even the great Sher­lock Holmes (Basil Rath­bone) is mys­ti­fied, but the hor­ror of the act is enough to dri­ve him to find the murder.

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