A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, October 5, 2019

The Third Secret (Charles Crichton, 1964)


The Third Secret (Charles Crichton, 1964)

Cast: Stephen Boyd, Pamela Franklin, Richard Attenborough, Diane Cilento, Jack Hawkins, Paul Rogers, Alan Webb, Rachel Kempson, Peter Sallis, Patience Collier, Freda Jackson, Judi Dench, Peter Copley. Screenplay: Robert L. Joseph. Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe. Production design: Thomas N. Morahan. Film editing: Frederick Wilson. Music: Richard Arnell.

The Third Secret is a moderately engaging whodunit probably most remembered today as Judi Dench's first movie. She plays the assistant to a gallery owner, Alfred Price-Gorham (Richard Attenborough), who becomes a suspect in the murder of a psychoanalyst, Dr. Leo Whitset (Peter Copley). Actually, Whitset's death was ruled a suicide until Alex Stedman (Stephen Boyd), an American who is a well-known commentator on British TV news, rejects the idea that Whitset, who was his analyst, could have killed himself. So Stedman starts snooping, aided by Whitset's precocious young daughter, Catherine (Pamela Franklin), who also doesn't believe her father could have committed suicide. She knows the names and addresses of Whitset's other clients, who include not only Price-Gorham but also a beautiful but neurotic young woman, Anne Tanner (Diane Cilento), and a distinguished judge, Sir Frederick Belline (Jack Hawkins). Stedman figures that each of them had a motive for killing Whitset, to keep the secrets they had confided in their analyst from becoming known. Naturally, complications ensue, and there are some mildly shocking twists before the truth -- the titular "third secret" -- comes out. Dench's few brief moments on film hardly make it worth seeking out, but it has the familiar comfortable quality of British mysteries and some nice black-and-white Cinemascope camera direction by Douglas Slocombe.
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