Chandler’s Trailers: “The Third Secret” (1964)

     Charles Crichton’s polished direction, with a particularly fine use of widescreen composition to emphasize the chess-like movement and positioning of characters within the frame, is featured in a complexly structured film in which the conventions of a murder mystery are used as a rather interesting dismantling of the conventions of the psychodrama, engaging in troubling ruminations on the ethics and consequences of the breaching of boundaries of confidentiality regardless of the motive; presenting a situation where legitimate moral goals are blurred with personal needs which in themselves are scrutinized with often less than palatable results. When a prominent psychiatric analyst  Dr. Leo Witset (Peter Copley) is found mortally shot and an official coroner’s pronouncement of suicide announced, transplanted American broadcast journalist Alex Stedman (Stephen Boyd) investigates the death at the insistence of the doctor’s young daughter Cathy (Pamela Franklin). That Stedman is a patient of the deceased is a source of volatile consternation, his frustration and feelings of helpless frustration exploding in a not particularly convincing scene that obscures his investigation between a legitimate search for the truth (figuring in the mystery of the “third secret”) and his own need for psychological comfort.

 

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