'Stop Me Before I Kill' is AKA 'The Full Treatment'. Both titles seem to fit this film quite well.A race car driver is in an accident and spends time in a coma, once he is awake he has the strange urge to kill his wife. His wife seeks help from a psychiatrist to help her husband overcome his urge and to find out why this is suddenly happening.The ending of this film seem appropriate - very befitting. I will not give it away for those who have not seen the film and would like to.This is not a bad mystery-drama - it's pretty good. No movie is "perfect" - they all have a few flaws and this one is no exception. The flaws in this film are minor.All movies are hard to fathom - you have to suspend your beliefs to watch any movie. With this film you will have to do the same thing as with any film.All in all a pretty good film. I enjoyed watching it.7/10

Before addressing the acting, which I regard as uniformly superb throughout, I should add my agreement with several other reviewers that there are several scenes in this film that are simply repetitive, so that it might have been more effective with about 15 or 20 minutes cut out of it. However, it is still highly effective as is, due to the acting of four of the five principals, those being Diane Cilento, Ronald Lewis, Claude Dauphin and Bernard Braden. The fifth, the damned-near immortal Francoise Rosay is fine, but really contributes little to the film from an acting standpoint; she simply has little to do and nothing to act. It's the kind of role that in an American film would have been given to Argentina Brunetti or Celia Lovsky! I'd never heard of this movie before - surprisingly, since I am a devotee of British film and acting from all periods and because this is, at least in the three leading roles, an impressive cast listing. I thought Cilento's accent was just fine throughout (if I didn't know her from anything else, I would never have thought of her as coming from Down Under); to me, it sounded Italian, but she uses a lot of French phrases and speaks French to others (the film takes place in France and England), so maybe that has confused other reviewers. The character's first name, "Denise", certainly sounds French rather than Italian, but that doesn't mean too much in a world where we have a noted Irish operatic baritone named Bruno Caproni! As with everything I've ever seen her in, Cilento is wonderful throughout, and very sexy in both voice and aspect. She beautifully captures both the character's love for, and fright of, her seemingly demented husband. Claude Dauphin was a pretty famous actor on both sides of the Atlantic at this time, and this is by far the best outing I have seen from him in an English-language film. I used to find him fairly hard to understand in our language, but not so in this one - and he has some really difficult dialogue (lots of it, and much of it replete with scientific jargon) to get through. He captures the psychiatrist's intelligence, egotism and kindness throughout, yet we are aware that there may be more to him than he shows on the surface. As for Ronald Lewis, I could never understand why he never became anything like an international star. He was a very good actor, with a resonant voice and wide emotional range, both very handsome and very macho (like good old George O'Brien, somebody always got him to remove his shirt in the course of a movie), and quite volatile as both villains and heroes - kind of like a visual and emotive cross between Stephen Boyd and Kirk Douglas. (This may have carried over to his personal life, as he did commit suicide when only 53.) Anyway, this is a very difficult role to play convincingly and he does it about as well as can be imagined (in fact, in this film he really did remind me of Stephen Boyd). A bit of a surprise is Bernard Braden, a Canadian actor with whom I was almost totally unfamiliar, but who plays an old friend of Lewis's who is about the only completely normal character in the film (Cilento is lovable, but hardly normal, unless one considers going to bed with someone you know may strangle you in the middle of the night to be normal), but he plays him extremely well and with a kind of of Everyman quality and lack of flair. Rosay, as I already said, is wasted here, but her English is actually less accented than is Dauphin's, perhaps reminding us that this most quintessentially French of French actresses did appear in a good number of English-language films during her long career.With a few outdoor scenes deleted, this film could almost serve as a play for three major acting talents, so it is a bit 'talky', but the talk is pretty solid. Anyway, there is lots of emotional excess here and the actors are really up to it, and despite its overlong process in reaching a somewhat surprising, if well thought out, denouement, it maintains and builds interest and suspense throughout. It probably deserves a 6 rating, but being performance oriented, I give it an 8. If you enjoy watching good actors act, this is a film for you. Suspend your disbelief and just enjoy it.

....says an agitated Allan Colby to sinister psychiatrist Dr. Prade. It is a very flimsy story for it's length (almost 2 hours!!) with a lot more questions being left unanswered than answered!! Why was Diane Cilento given an accent, why couldn't they have left her as a sultry British girl (maybe there wasn't such a thing as a sultry English girl in 1960 - but what about Joan Greenwood or Shirley Ann Field!!). And while Cilento was attractive, she wasn't really the type who would send a strait laced doctor into a spin - maybe it was her nude swim!!!The film starts at the scene of a horrific accident involving ace racing car driver Allan Colby, his new bride Denise and, as we learn later, a truck driver who dies at the scene. Next scene shows that after a year in and out of hospital Colby and Denise are on the continent on a belated honeymoon but something is not right. Colby is often agitated, finding offense at the smallest thing - even punching Dr. Prade who has invited them for dinner at his water front villa. Of course Colby is contrite the next morning but not before he has tried to strangle Denise for the second time. Denise has stayed behind to talk to the doctor while Colby has sped off in his car that the day before he could not drive over 30 mph!! Prade notices the bruising around her throat and more than ever wants to put his plan into action - watching her take a nude swim complete with binoculars doesn't strike one as the actions of a trust worthy doctor.I was actually expecting the denouement to be that he wasn't a doctor after all but the rest of the movie focused on his artful plan of trying to prove to Denise that Conrad is highly dangerous and needs to be locked up and to convince Conrad that he has actually gone through with his grisly plan to kill his wife and dispose of the body.Again Cilento's dodgy accent didn't help, first Italian then French, finally she suggest that they both go home to England!! Added to the fact that Colby's behaviour is so erratic and dangerous but no police are called!! The film does boast a couple of stellar French names - Claude Dauphine from the theatre and the legendary Francoise Rosay as the dignified Madame Prade.

Brusque, high-strung, and short-tempered race car driver Alan Colby (a solid and credible performance) is trying to recover from a serious head injury. Alan and his loyal wife Denise (winningly played by the sultry Diane Cilento) go on vacation to the South of France for some much needed rest and relaxation. But Alan is having trouble resisting his more violent impulses. Suave local psychiatrist David Prade (a smooth portrayal by Claude Dauphin) offers to help Alan out. Director Val Guest, who also co-wrote the overly talky script with Ronald Scott Thorn, unfortunately allows the uneventful story to plod along at a very slow pace and fails to generate much in the way of either tension or excitement. The key problem with this film is that nothing much happens; it's basically just a handful of people yakking up a storm for an overlong hour and forty-eight minutes. The capable cast do their best with the bland material, but their competent acting can't completely alleviate the general tedium. Moreover, the pretty obvious and predictable conclusion fails to deliver the goods as well. On the plus side, both the lovely Cilento and the French scenery look absolutely gorgeous while Gilbert Taylor's sharp black and white widescreen cinematography and Stanley Black's swinging jazzy score are up to speed. Passable, but overall a really blah and unmemorable picture.