THE THIRD SECRET (1964)

When the secretary for London psychiatrist Leo Whitset opens up his office one morning, she finds him on the floor, dying from a gunshot wound. His last words are "Blame no one but me," so the police assume suicide. However, Whitset's teenage daughter Cathy (Pamela Franklin) disputes this claim, as does TV commentator Alex Stedman (Stephen Boyd, at right) who had been a patient of Whitset's for years. Cathy thinks the killer may have been a patient. Whitset called his patients "good healthy neurotics" but Alex thinks that one of them may have been a paranoid schizophrenic. As their investigation begins, they remember Whitset's philosophy that we all have three kinds of secrets: the ones we won't tell others, the ones we won't tell ourselves, and the third secret (which is not defined in any more detail). Cathy gives Alex the names of his current patients and he visits each one: an art gallery owner (Richard Attenborough) who is himself a frustrated artist; a judge (Jack Hawkins); and a secretary (Diane Cilento) with whom Boyd gets slightly involved. Meanwhile, as Cathy and Alex become close, her uncle finds them looking a little too intimate in her bedroom and suspects that the relationship is unhealthy. With Alex himself as a fourth patient, he soon learns that there is one more patient to hunt down.

This psychological thriller is interesting but less than compelling, and I'm not quite sure why it doesn't work better than it does. One reason is that little tension is generated along the way; the three patient visits feel mostly like the movie is killing time—though it is fun to see a very young Judi Dench as Attenborough's assistant. Boyd, who has the reputation of being a bit wooden at times, is fine here, not so much wooden as a bit distant, which works with the character. The 14-year-old Franklin is very good, playing a character who, though seemingly open and innocent, may be (as Boyd might be too) hiding secrets of her own. The widescreen black & white cinematography is excellent and the ending, which is perhaps a bit predictable, is satisfying. This film disappeared from view for some time, though it did get a DVD release from Fox a few years ago, but Fox is not always very good at promotion of their backlist resources. The YouTube print which I saw is crisp and clean, probably from the DVD or the British Blu-Ray disc. [YouTube]