Leofwine_draca 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.

malcolmgsw 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.

allanwparkes 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?

msturdy it struck so powerfully when I was young it has stayed in my mind ever since. The daughter in her night dress, sleep walking on the top of a cliff on a windy rainy dark night, and going to throw herself over, as her mother had, but being rescued just in time by her boyfriend and another I think. My philosophical response to it in later years, was that in the event she didn't have to do what her mother had done. In adult interpretation this would be that the repetition compulsion had not had to be acted out. And that this was a deliverance. It must have some connection with my mother's early death from cancer. Jeremy Ross. AFECT film school. London