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.

Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)

Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)

Cast: Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins, Dorothy Shupenes, Peter Shupenes, Jerome Thier, M.L. Kennedy, Milton Gittleman, Charles Dosinan, Jack Ford, Rozamond Peck, Frank Jourdano. Screenplay: Barbara Loden. Cinematography: Nicholas T. Proferes. Film editing: Nicholas T. Proferes.

If Barbara Loden had made other films, would Wanda be as celebrated as it is today? Would it, for example, have found its way into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry? Or would its raw, sometimes clunky, defiantly unpolished filmmaking have doomed it to obscurity as the amateur work of an actress best known for secondary roles in movies made by her ex-husband, Elia Kazan? Wanda is, like its title character, a bit of a mess. Wanda herself is barely a character; she's more of a creature of impulse, bolting a dead-end marriage in an American Rust Belt town, allowing herself to get picked up by strange men, and eventually being coerced into going along on a road trip that ends in a scheme to rob a bank. But as a writer-director, Loden is impulsive, too. So there's a cheesy, rundown religious theme park we can shoot in? Fine, let's do it, and maybe have Wanda's partner in crime, Mr. Dennis, meet his father there as she explores the fake catacombs. The scene does nothing to advance the story or even to illuminate the characters, but is there as a sort of quirkiness for quirkiness's sake. There's also a sort of calm-before-the-storm interlude before the abortive bank robbery scene, in which Wanda and Mr. Dennis picnic and watch a model airplane doing loop-the-loops. And yet, Wanda somehow works because Loden has some of the best instincts of a filmmaker, exemplified early in the movie by the long shots of Wanda, dressed in white, walking past gray slagheaps, giving her an entirely ironic image of innocence and purity. Loden represses any instinct to mock the depressed milieu in which Wanda exists, but lets the tackiness and bad taste that surround her speak for themselves. She also wisely resisted the ending originally planned for the film, in which Wanda would be arrested as an accessory for the bank robbery, but leaves her protagonist looking sad and lost in a bar where country musicians are playing. I don't feel as enthusiastic about Wanda as some do, but it makes me wish that Loden had lived to make more films.

The Glass Key (Stuart Heisler, 1942)

The Glass Key (Stuart Heisler, 1942)

Cast: Alan Ladd, Brian Donlevy, Veronica Lake, William Bendix, Bonita Granville, Joseph Calleia, Richard Denning, Frances Gifford, Donald MacBride, Margaret Hayes, Moroni Olsen, Eddie Marr, Arthur Loft, George Meader. Screenplay: Jonathan Latimer, based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett. Cinematography: Theodor Sparkuhl. Art direction: Haldane Douglas, Hans Dreier. Film editing: Archie Marshek. Music: Victor Young, Walter Scharf.

There's something a little febrile about The Glass Key, and I don't just mean the movie -- it' s inherent in Dashiell Hammett's novel, too. The movie heightens it with the casting of Veronica Lake, who always seems a little out of it in her movies, on which she often clashed with directors and/or stars. And William Bendix's sadistic thug has a special menace for those of us who remember him in his familiar sitcom role, as the working-class schlub in The Life of Riley. It was a breakthrough role for Alan Ladd as the semi-conscientious right-hand man to Brian Donlevy's shady politician. Ladd gets beaten into the hospital by Bendix, where he spends a lot of time doing what he does best: flirting, in this case with the nurse. He also flirts with Lake, as the daughter of Donlevy's political rival turned ally, as well as with Bonita Granville, as Donlevy's sister, and even the wife of the corrupt newspaper publisher who wants to frame Donlevy for murder. And so on, in a reasonably faithful translation of Hammett's book that only misses the author's dryly tough prose style.