Warning! Contains spoiler! I saw this movie on television many years ago. Being a Pamela Franklin fan, I just had to watch it. It was a very good movie with a wonderful surprise ending! Very suspenseful. The entire cast is great. It's a very unusual story. I can't get the scene of Ms. Franklin trying to stab Steven Boyd with a pair of scissors out of my head! Reminds me of the scene where she kills Dirk Bogard with a fire poker in "Our Mother's House." Pamela has done a lot of interesting film roles that are different from the norm. This is one of them and definitely worth seeing. I hope they will release this on DVD one day soon!

Pamela Franklin is at her precocious best in this tale of "psychoanalytical" intrigue with boundary-crossing sexual overtones. Precocity often took her into territory it's now fashionable to call "inappropriate," such as the schoolgirl love interest she played with a randy old artist in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." Though understated and implicit in "The Third Secret," her emotionally-troubled character's relationship with Stephen Boyd's character is in this same vein. All of 18 when I saw this in theatrical release, I was captivated. The movie is still a guilty pleasure, though you have to suspend a lot of disbelief to get back in that naive early-60s groove when sexuality was still portrayed indirectly through characters who were not exactly the Free Spirits that populated such films later in the decade.Look for a spooky cinematic trick toward the end of the film, when Stephen Boyd's character is just starting to unravel the big Secret. Pamela makes a statement about how many patients her father had-- Stephen thinks he misheard her, and asks her to repeat what she said. Watch carefully for the "subliminal" trick, which could easily go unnoticed-- it made the hair on my arms stand up.Hokey in parts, and based on some then-commonplace misconceptions about psychiatric disorders, the movie still works if you can accept it on its own terms. At the very least its understatement is a refreshing change from the noise-saturated frantic bombast of today's not-so-spooky films, with their mindless reliance on sensory overload and oh-so-special effects.

One of the slowest, most plodding, and dreary movies that I have ever seen. No action at all unless you consider frequent lapses into hysterics by various characters as action. Skip this one folks. It's horrible and the ultimate conclusion is so obvious as this dull story inches along as to be painful to watch.

A British psychologist has apparently committed suicide, but his teenage daughter is convinced it was murder and asks one of his patients (Stephen Boyd, as an expatriate American journalist) to investigate. Somber, brooding, introspective tale, with Boyd well-cast in the lead; elegantly written (worthwhile just for the dialogue), and moodily shot in black and white. Regrettably, the film is inaccurate in its portrayal of psychiatry; despite what the script says, people suffering from paranoid schizophrenia are no more likely to be murderers than anyone else, and people with schizophrenia cannot hide their illness as though they were undercover spies. That small suspension of disbelief aside, the film ruminates on all sorts of interesting ideas that fit together like inlaid wood.The film is enhanced by an excellent cast, including Jack Hawkins, Richard Attenborough, and Diane Cilento as the three suspects, the now-legendary Judi Dench in her first credited role, and the much under-rated child actress, Pamela Franklin, as the psychologist's daughter. In particular, though, Attenborough's performance as an awkward, insecure art dealer stands out as a remarkable contrast to his performance in another film of 1964--"Guns at Batasi," in which he plays a tough, almost indestructible British Army sergeant.