'THE THIRD DAY'.......FORGET ME KNOTS

The Third Day (1965)   It's interesting that this came out the same year as one our favorite imitation Hitchcock thrillers, "Mirage" with Gregory Peck......

              Both movies featured their amnesia-afflicted leads untangling mysteries while struggling to figure out who the hell they are, exactly.......

                No comparison here at all......"Mirage", which we've already posted about was a twisty, smartly written suspenser and one our faves.....

                "The Third Day" is strictly Technicolored spam-in-a-can, a TV-style sausage rolled  off the Warner Brothers assembly line......with delusions of grandeur about being a theatrical film, the kind of movie that the studios still reflexively sputtered out even as they were in the process of crumbling.

                 George Peppard staggers away from a roadside crash into a river with his memory wiped.......and quickly discovers he's a factory manager who married the CEO's daughter.....and for some unrevealed reasons, Georgie's roundly disliked by everyone he comes in contact with.........including a snaky cousin-in-law (Roddy McDowell) who's trying to sell the company out from under him.....

                  Further complicating his life is a potential murder charge, since the hot-to-trot slut in the crashed car's passenger seat isn't coming out her coma........(but we will credit a young Sally Kellerman with making quite an impression in her first film , playing the deceased twitching trollop in flashbacks...)...

                  We won't belabor this movie's plot any further, since it's riddled with more holes than George's memory and elicits no interest in clarifying how Slutty Sally ended up in the river.....even stranger, George glides through his amnesia as if he's suffering no more than a mild cold.....(unlike the mental tortures of Gregory Peck in "Spellbound" and "Mirage")

                  To keep you from dozing off altogether, there's an outstanding supporting cast, with Elizabeth Ashley as Peppard's hot 'n cold wife, Mona Washbourne as McDowell's not-so-doting mother.......and sadly Herbert Marshall in his last film, playing the stroke-victim CEO who can only move one finger....

                   The movie's a slick enough product, but it's so paint-by-numbers, it has no interest in itself  or the story it's telling. We wonder if its director, Jack Smight, was even fully awake while making it.......

                  That would certainly account for the film's fatal, unintentionally funny flaw.......the ludicrous miscasting of its principal villain.....an oily piano bar tinkler who turns out to be Slutty Sally's emasculated husband.....(aha! The plot sickens......).

                 He's played by the diminutive comic actor Arte Johnson, who later when on to great TV fame as part of the 'Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In ensemble. As threatening at a smurf and about a foot and a half shorter than Peppard, Johnson's attempts at smarmy villainy come off as.....embarrassing and painful ......

                  The climactic, unlikely spectacle of Johnson going on a violent rampage and engaging in a beach surf tussle with Peppard made us realize how much precious time we'd wasted watching this......

                   But that's the price BQ pays for our undying interest in obscure 1960's cinema.......we'll still keep unearthing these movies.......and take in the bad with the good......1 star (*)   Just like George's amnesia, you can forget this movie right after you experience it.....