Here’s the transcript to my latest video, a chat about the 1969 TV movie Daughter of the Mind starring Ray Milland, Gene Tierney, and Ed Asner. If you would like to listen, the video is embedded below.

I did not mean to do this, but in the last week I’ve watched at least four pilot episodes of shows that never got picked up from the ’60s and ’70s that were about an investigator trying to figure out whether psychic phenomena existed or not. I know The Night Stalker got made in the early ’70s, but it kind of was a flop cult thing, and they never got this concept to stick until The X-Files ran wild with it.

The one I’m thinking about today, because it’s so crazy, is called Daughter of the Mind. It stars Ray Milland and Gene Tierney, who were in two of my favorite ’40s movies, The Uninvited and Laura. So immediately, I really want to love this movie. But I believe they were like the guest stars in the credits, and the real star was Don Murray.

Tierney and Milland have lost a child in a car accident, and yet she starts appearing to him and moving things around in her playroom. They have a friend who’s a psychiatrist, and Don Murray works for the friend, so he comes in to investigate. Ray Milland says to him point blank, “Do you believe there’s such things as ghosts?” Don Murray crosses his arms and says, “I try to keep an open mind.” Then he talks to Gene Tierney, and suddenly he’s on board and moves in with them.

Let me just say, it is extremely obvious who is perpetuating this hoax. I’ll go ahead and say it’s a hoax because they tell you in the description and the title—the “daughter of the mind” is not a real daughter. You can tell who’s doing the hoax as soon as you see them. But there’s another person that comes on to try to stop Don Murray from stopping… okay, I’ve gotten off track.

All of this is a psyop. Ed Asner plays some tough guy from an alphabet agency who wants Ray Milland to continue this big science work he’s doing that’s actually weapons, but he doesn’t know it’s weapons. It’s just like that sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look where Robert Webb is a scientist who keeps making things that only have military applications and doesn’t realize it, and he wants to smash them all.

Basically, the bad guys in this are the people trying to stop Ray Milland from making—I think it’s intercontinental missiles. Looking at this from the future, if you want to slow down the military-industrial complex, that’s okay with me. Now watch this video get suppressed because I said this! But on the other hand, since Ed Asner was such a cool guy and I loved The Mary Tyler Moore Show and him so much, I was kind of on his side, too. He’s driving around in a big Impala trying to catch the bad guys with Don Murray in the car, and it’s cool, but this is not a great movie.

Maybe I wish that there had been a ghost or at least some ambiguity. What I think of most of all with a movie like this—a tech thriller from the ’60s—is when I watch sci-fi from the ’60s (and this goes for Star Trek too, today is like the 60th anniversary of Star Trek, so I have to bring this up), we have not yet reached the heights of science fiction as it was presented to us in the ’60s. We thought that we were going to have post-scarcity and a flying car by now.

Anyway, what do you think was the purpose of all the shows that had a detective investigating ghosts? They kept making pilots—now we have them as TV movies because most of them didn’t make it to series. What was it about people in the ’60s and ’70s? Did they not want these things debunked, or did they not want them proven? And then we were ready for it in the ’90s? The ’90s were a very Bohemian time. We did have an open mind with uncrossed arms—an actual open mind in my experience.

Let me know what you think in the comments. If you’ve seen a bunch of these types of movies, or if you’ve seen Daughter of the Mind, you can easily watch it on YouTube. I would watch the lower-quality version that someone uploaded 15 years ago, and not one of the ones where someone has done cheap at-home AI upscaling, because that tends to make the colors weird and make all kinds of flashes all over the place. There’s enough weird stuff in this movie for you to enjoy.

Until next time, stay on task unless you’re making bombs, and have a good night!