Strong Enough for a Man, But Made for a Woman

FXM brought a couple of movies out of the vault at the beginning of the month, so I DVRed them to do posts on when they air again. One of those movies, The Third Secret, will be showing on FXM tomorrow at 11:25 AM (and again Thursday at 9:35 AM).

The movie starts off in a townhouse in London. A maid comes in to do her morning routine, and when she steps in to her boss' office, she sees the man dying, with a gunshot wound to the head. With the gun close by and the man talking as though it's a suicide, everything certainly points to suicide.

Cut to a TV studio in London. American commentator Alex Stedman (Stephen Boyd) is finishing up his TV show on the comments of an American expat. He hears news of the man's death: noted psychicatrist Dr. Leo Whitset, who worked for the British Analysis Institute. But Dr. Whitset also had some private patients, and Stedman was one of them, so he's quite unhappy with the good doctor's death.

Stedman is even more unhappy when the official inquest determines the doctor killed himself. Stedman knows the doctor wouldn't have done it, and figures somebody must have murdered him. But who, and how? After all, the signs point to suicide, and there wasn't any break-in. Perhaps it could have been one of the other patients, since after all Whitset was treating people with some pretty severe psychological problems. The authorities quite rightly won't give Stedman a list of Whitset's patients. But then he meets Whitset's adolecsent daughter Catherine (Pamela Franklin), who remembers the names and addresses of the patients from Dad's outgoing mail.

Stedman sets out to see each of the other patients, although he has to be coy about it as he can't let on why he's seeing them. Would you want to be accused of murder? And would you want some stranger to know that you were seeing a psychiatrist for some pretty severe problems? But Stedman still has to see them. There's art dealer and very frustrated artist Alfred Price-Gorham (Richard Attenborough; watch for a very young Judi Dench as his assistant); secretary Anne Tanner (Diane Cilento); and very honorable judge Sir Frederick (Jack Hawkins).

After seeing each of the other patients, Stedman realizes he's no closer to figuring out who killed Whitset, even though he's still certain it was murder and not suicide. This even though one of the other patients does something the point the finger at a potential murderer....

The Third Secret is an interesting little movie, with a slew of good performances as you'd probably expect considering the cast. The movie isn't perfect, as I found some of Stedman's scenes with his fellow patients to be a bit cold and straining credulity. That, and Stedman seems to be so much more stable mentally than the other patients, so why was he seeing this doctor who could pick and choose his patients.

Overall, though, The Third Secret is definitely a worthy movie. It doesn't seem to be on DVD, however, so you're going to have to catch it on FXM before it goes back in the vault.