THE MOVIE:

The first secret is what we don't tell other people, the second is what we don't tell ourselves, and the third...well, the third is another matter entirely.

A prominent British psychoanalyst, Dr. Leo Whitset (Peter Copley), is found by his maid as he takes his last breath. From the look of the evidence and his dying declaration, his death is ruled a suicide. This rocks the academic world he worked in, as it is feared that if a leading therapist couldn't even save himself, therapy will lose its credibility. It certainly unnerves his patients, especially the American TV commentator Alex Stedman (Stephen Boyd, Fantastic Voyage), who now wonders how much of what Dr. Whitset told him was really a lie. Thus, when the good doctor's fourteen-year-old daughter, Catherine (Pamela Franklin, The Innocents), comes to him and begs him to prove her father was murdered, she doesn't have to twist his arm very hard.

Alex's hunt for the killer is the plot that occupies the rest of The Third Secret, a middling 1964 thriller directed by Ealing veteran Charles Crichton (The Lavender Hill Mob, A Fish Called Wanda). Doing his best John Frankenheimer impression, Crichton follows Alex as he goes from the police to the school where Whitset taught, and then on to the three other patients that were being treated by the analyst besides himself. I say the director follows the character, because that's very much what he does. The way the story of The Third Secret progresses, it feels like we're treading a path traced out on a map, hitting all the right points, but not really exploring. For a paranoid murder mystery like this, the filmmaker should really be leading his audience through it, involving us fully in the story, causing us to doubt what we see and think we know. The Third Secret never quite gets there.

Though, it does get close to the mark at times. To the film's credit, though I actually guessed who the killer was pretty early on (right after Alex gets a quick tutorial in schizophrenia), as The Third Secret progressed, a well-placed red herring had me convinced I was wrong. When it comes back around that I was right, it was kind of a pleasant surprise. This means that the filmmakers did have the ability to suck me into their world, they just didn't exploit it in full.

Much of the success of that particular second-act bait-and-switch is down to the visual style of the movie. Crichton and his cinematographer, Douglas Slocombe (the man who shot the Indiana Jones movies), understand how to light a black-and-white film to create an eerie mood. They also make full use of the widescreen frame, often stretching out the environment so that their characters seem very small within it. They employ London side streets and narrow alleys to create a sense of vertigo, something that comes off particularly well in a scene where Catherine thinks she is being chased.

It seems to be at the script stage that The Third Secret fails to gel. Written by producer Robert L. Joseph (a scribe on Boris Karloff's TV horror anthology The Veil), The Third Secret is too light in its set-up and often sketchy in the places that count. Whenever the story takes an important shift, Joseph moves from point A to point C while completely skipping over point B--kicking me right out of whatever mood Crichton and Slocombe managed to lull me into. This hopscotch technique makes the meatier bits of the script feel rushed and the pretext by which Alex begins his investigation to come off as thin. His whole approach is sketchy, and the character actually ends up looking like a lout when he gains the trust of his fellow psych patients only to recklessly rummage around in their insecurities. It's not helped, either, by the fact that Stephen Boyd is such a stiff leading man.

Where The Third Secret does get it right is in most of the scenes with Alex and Catherine. Even if we're never quite sure why the bond between them is there initially, their shared memories of her father end up being a convincing reason why he pursues her beliefs with such determination. It's she who introduces the riddle of the three secrets, and she keeps him challenged by scribbling unfinished quotations on the wall outside of her old home. Alex never fails to fill in the blank, and so she has faith he can do it this time, too. It's just too bad the filmmakers let him skip over so many crucial points of the riddle. If he were telling a joke, we'd only have gotten the set-up, a few random in-between pieces, and the punchline, leaving too much of the nuance and atmosphere out of the equation for us to ever really understand why it's funny.

Or, in the case of The Third Secret, leaving us far enough removed from the goings-on to really believe Alex will uncover anything or, even worse, to witness the shocks with the appropriate jolt. I have a feeling I was supposed to jump out of my seat at different points, but instead, I just nodded and said, "Yes, I see." And that ain't right. I was seeing, but I wasn't experiencing.

THE DVD

Video:
The Third Secret is shown in a 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio. While the print the DVD was struck from was very clean, the final product could have used some more knob twiddling. There is a lot of combing going on through The Third Secret, often making the lovely black-and-white photography look shimmery.

Sound:
I also had some issues with the levels on the English stereo mix. Some of the dialogue is too low in volume, rendering it indistinct at times. I had to back up once or twice and hit my subtitle button so I wouldn't miss what was said again. There is also an English mono track and a Spanish mono track, as well as Spanish subtitles.

Extras:
A few bonus features are included: the original theatrical trailer, a stills gallery, and a gallery recreating the press book from the original release of The Third Secret.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Rent It. The Third Secret never quite came together for me. Though director Charles Crichton does a good job of establishing a haunting, paranoid mood, the script by Robert L. Joseph is too choppy to give this murder mystery the appropriate level of thrills. This makes for a movie that is quite excellent in some parts, and frustratingly bland in others, causing it to feel like a B-movie that thinks it's an A-movie, never realizing it doesn't have the talent to pull of the masquerade. Still, worth a look-see for the excellent black-and-white photography and the occasional good twist.

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. He is best known for his collaborations with Joelle Jones, including the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, the challenging romance 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, for which Jones did the cover. All three were published by Oni Press. His most recent projects include the futuristic romance A Boy and a Girl with Natalie Nourigat; Archer Coe and the Thousand Natural Shocks, a loopy crime tale drawn by Dan Christensen; and the horror miniseries Madame Frankenstein, a collaboration with Megan Levens. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.