Admittedly, the story I am going to tell you is less convincing (or interesting, for that matter) than the much more plausible story of how I am partially responsible for the casting of John Cleese as Q in the James Bond movies. (See the Site Journal entry for March 13, 1999.)

Still.

So I was reading about the movie "The Deep End," a film noir that crosses Hitchcock with "Blood Simple" (or so it seems; I haven't seen it yet), and I ran across the trivia fact that the original story, a novel published in 1947, was filmed as "The Reckless Moment" in 1949 with Joan Bennett and James Mason. I thought, huh, that sounds familiar. So I looked it up in At-A-Glance Film Reviews, and it turned out that I had not only seen it but reviewed it.

I reviewed it on April 4, 1999, to be exact. I reread my review. It closes with the following sentence:

"Modern movies that portray mothers that strongly devoted to their families tend to go off the deep end, making them either overbearing or psychotic; that tends to be less interesting than the simple unskewed showcase of human nature."

Did you catch that? Let me zero in on it for you:

"...tend to go off THE DEEP END..."

Given that my review predates the movie by two years -- probably right around the time the idea of remaking "The Reckless Moment" was being bandied about at the studio -- the logical assumption is that somebody was doing Internet research on the original film, ran across my review, spotted my use of the expression, and thought, hey, that's perfect.

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