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Thursday, June 23, 2022

THE THIRD DAY (1965)

You can almost hear the old studio system collapsing around you in this inert melodrama.  Not only in its soapy plot (amnesiac can’t explain the car crash that killed his mistress while he attempts to save his marriage and the family business before his frail father-in-law dies), but also in the way the old story beats & tropes had the rug pulled out from under them when studio artifice, backlots and the comfort of monochrome were exchanged for the vagaries of life in the real world and color.  What once had been phony (at worst) but at best artistically abstracted into all-of-a-piece drama is now only phony.  Certainly so with styleless hack Jack Smight producing/directing.*  With Percy Faith’s wretched musical exclamations.  In set decoration that puts Mona Washbourne, that embodiment of lower-middle-class British acquiescence, inside a tastelessly overstuffed estate as doyen to old-money power & wealth.  (Greer Garson too busy?)  Sally Kellerman debuts as wanton mistress; a pre-LAUGH-IN Arte Johnson sounds just like Mel Tormé as the piano-playing cuckold; Roddy McDowall, Robert Webber, Arthur O’Connell, Vincent Gardenia also on hand, while poor Herbert Marshall ends his film career with less than a whimper, ‘speaking’ with a finger tap.  All so Elizabeth Ashley & George Peppard can rekindle their relationship from ground zero.  Amnesia, the ultimate reboot opportunity.

ATTTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *An early scene for Peppard & Ashley (as disagreement tilts to bedside seduction) could serve as a Film School 101 lesson in bad editing and where not to put the camera.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The arrogant prick element that always came to the surface in George Peppard made for a good fit in his next (and probably best) perf, THE BLUE MAX/’66.

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