The Third Secret

"The Third Secret" from 1964 is a British film starring Stephen Boyd, Pamela Franklin, and Diane Cilento as well as a few stars in small roles: Richard Attenborough, Jack Hawkins, Rachel Kempson, and Nigel Davenport. Judi Dench has a small role -- she was just coming up the ladder.

Boyd plays a television journalist, Alex Stedman, who also happens to be the patient of psychiatrist Leo Whitset. When Whitset is found dead, it's an apparent suicide, as he tells his housekeeper that he is responsible. Everyone assumes he means responsible for his own death though no one checks it out.

Whitset's teenage daughter (Franklin) appeals to Boyd, stating that her father could not have killed himself. The suicide is devastating to Boyd, and he is desperate to learn whether or not it's true, because otherwise, he can never believe anything his doctor told him. Suicide was a direct contradiction of his work.

Stedman is able to get a list of Whitset's patients and starts visiting them to discern which one of them could be the killer. He develops a relationship with a beautiful woman (Diane Cilento) who was also a patient of the doctor's.

There are plenty of suspects, but who could it be? Whitset's daughter tells Alex that her father said there are three secrets everyone has: the one you won't tell anyone, the one you won't tell yourself, and one other.

I thought the acting was very good all around, with Franklin's young voice a little too high-pitched for me -- I had the same problem listening to Deanna Durbin as a child - after awhile, it becomes annoying.

My problem with the story is that it dragged. At 90 minutes or so, it felt like three hours. It was interesting, it is by no means a bad film or badly directed, but it was hard for me to get into for some reason. Others found much more to like in it - mine is just one opinion.

In an era obsessed with 'mental health issues', this film about deeply damaged personalities probably has more resonance now than when first released. The 'madness' element was much reduced by 20th Century Fox and Patricia Neal's role as one of the psychiatric patients consigned to the cutting-room floor. Most critics at the time gave it the thumbs down but over half a century on it remains an engrossing if not entirely convincing piece, the strength of which lies in the splendid and in some cases immensely touching performances from a first-rate cast under Charles Crichton's sensitive direction whilst Douglas Slocombe's superb cinematography accentuates the gloom and Richard Arnell's atonal score underlines the derangement.

Listening to the film's obligatory psychobabble brought to mind playwright Jerome Lawrence's observation: "A neurotic builds a castle in the air, a psychotic lives in it and a psychiatrist collects the rent."

I first saw this as a kid, in 1970, on tv, and thought the nightmare sequence at Diane Cilento's home to be one of the scariest scenes I'd ever seen on film. After 29 years the impact is somewhat diluted, but overall the film holds together pretty well. Take a look at the extraordinary Douglas Slocombe panavision cinematography, the driven performances of Franklin and Boyd - an underrated actor if there ever was one - the striking set pieces on the Thames riverbank. It should be restored and re-issued on a VERY big screen. Scorsese, where art thou?

I was the edge of my seat! A suspenseful Who Done It with compelling performances by Pamela Franklin and Stephen Boyd in challengingly complex roles. The plot is fairly progressive for its time - the topic of mental illness still somewhat taboo in our society. I read somewhere that Stephen Boyd was so taken with the story and the character, he took a sizeable pay cut to play the role of Alex. Versatile actor that he was, he seemed to most enjoy those demanding and unusual character roles with substance and depth that really challenge an actor and in which he performed so notably well. And Pamela Franklin, at the age of 14, is an incredible actress taking on a role that veterans would not have managed nearly as well.

Great story - great film - great acting!

Just to elaborate on certain comments about Pamela Franklin; she was born in 1950, and 'The Third Secret' was made in 1964, which made her... 14. Not 18, although she may have seemed precociously mature for her age - but then, that's very much part of the fabric of the film. Her scenes with Boyd carry a sexual tension that film-makers and society in general were brave enough to confront at that time. Indeed, don't films from the 60s and 70s (until Star Wars brought serious cinema crashing down) seem terribly grown up? Although Charles Crichton was an Ealing man, his work here is more reminiscent of the Woodfall school of British realism, and light years away from his comedic timing in 'The Battle of the Sexes'. It's hard to deny that the dialogue gets a bit stodgy at times - a pity, since the screenplay contains a great many sly clues to the solution which can get lost amidst the psycho-babble. This was made at a time when much of the UK's cinema was in the hands of serious craftsmen and women - their films are exemplary lessons in thoughtful, considered cinema. However, in this case, fine technique fails to overcome a wordy screenplay, although it's a close-run thing.