Watch The Third Day For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Adaptation of Joseph Hayes' book about a "buffoon" who survives a horrible car crash but with amnesia; he's unsure of his wealth and position, which his wife's elderly aunt is happy to fill him in on (she acts like a scorecard for the confused man, as well as the audience). Turns out he's a wealthy, ruthless boozer who holds the financial fate of most of the city's residents in his hands, being the owner of the local factory that he's considering selling off. He also had a woman in the car with him the day he drove off a mountain road, and if she dies he could be tried for homicide. Well-dressed but corny melodrama tries too hard to raise chills, such as when George Peppard sees something that jars his memory and Percy Faith's overly-fancy music swells up on the soundtrack like in a Hitchcock thriller. Roddy McDowall steals scenes as a nefarious relative (he's such a brittle prig, you half expect him to crack after Elizabeth Ashley slaps him), Sally Kellerman debuts in a showy flashback role, and Arte Johnson (pre-"Laugh-In") surprises with a serious performance as an unbalanced lounge pianist. The plot is slackly-handled by director Jack Smight. Under better circumstances, this might have been an exciting potboiler; as it is, the film's posh décor upstages the dull, soapy contrivances. *1/2 from ****

The Third Day is a good film, with good actors. But the reviewers seem not to have seen the movie. All assume that Roddy McDowall plays the brother of the Peppard character. Quite a trick, since Peppard plays the only main character not of the wealthy Parsons family. Who is Oliver Parsons, the character played by Roddy McDowall? He is the first cousin of Elizabeth Ashley's character, herself the only child of the Parsons patriarch (Herbert Marshall). Oliver's father is the deceased younger brother of the patriarch; Mona Washbourne plays the widow, Oliver's mother. Now that the patriarch is incapacitated by a stroke, who will get control of the company which has made the Parsons family rich? Oliver, the patriarch's nephew and closest male relative by blood, assumes it will be he, and already holds meetings of the board and sits at the head of the Parsons' dining table. But Peppard has married the boss's daughter. He is popular with the employees and wishes to revamp the company into the maker of modern parts using ceramics rather than ceramic figures long out of fashion. Oliver wants to sell off the company to a conglomerate looking for a tax write-off with no thought of the employees whose jobs the patriarch's son- in-law wishes to save. The audience will now know whom to favor. But the mysterious car accident throws into confusion the purposes of the patriarch's daughter and son-in-law. Without this knowledge of the Parsons family, the plot makes no sense. The joking demeanor between cousins, Oliver's mother berating her son for unprincipled ambition, the politics of the dining table, the police chief's pursuit of the son-in-law--all and most of the rest of the tale disappear into the reviewers' ignorance. Ashley and McDowall play brilliantly the two most interesting characters, who have survived together from childhood the Parsons politik and know each other very well. But it is Oliver's, and McDowall 's, movie. What does he know about the car accident, if anything? Almost every DVD box has a summary with at least one mistake in it, and a big one. Reviewers of The Third Day top this by mistaking the structure of the entire family whose machinations form the what, who, and why of the tale. How this happens, who can say? Too many popcorn breaks? The family relationships are emphasized in the dynamics of every scene in which two or more of the Parsons dynasty appear. Who is the villain, and in what does the villainy consist? Ashley's finest speech locates the answers in what else? Family values, and valuables.

The Third Day which is a nice suspenseful film, modeled somewhat on the Gregory Peck classic Mirage which is about an amnesia victim has George Peppard as the protagonist amnesia victim. It is both the debut film of Sally Kellerman and the farewell performance of Herbert Marshall.It was quite a debut for Kellerman, she's seen only in flashback as a pleasure driven hedonist who is killed in automobile accident as the car they were driving in went off the road and into the Pacific Ocean. Peppard survives the crash, but it's left him an amnesiac and he struggles to pick up the pieces of his life.Turns out he's married to the wealthy and socially prominent Elizabeth Ashley as he was then in real life and it was a case of marrying the boss's daughter as Peppard was in middle management of the town's main employer, a ceramics factory. But he's been driven from her and Kellerman has been more than willing to meet Peppard's needs. Ashley also has an upper crust twit brother in Roddy McDowell who's got an agenda all worked out for Peppard and that factory. McDowell and Kellerman are the best ones in the film.Liz and Roddy's parents are Mona Washburne and Herbert Marshall. What was sad in this film was that Marshall spoke not a word and I wonder if his part was written that way because of his own health problems. He plays a stroke victim and he's catatonic. Because of that a lot of people like McDowell are playing all kinds of games with the business he is the head of. There's also a really ambitious new District Attorney played by Robert Webber who would like nothing better than to nail a prominent hide like Peppard's as that boost him to higher office.It takes three days to finally sort all the pieces out hence the title The Third Day. It's a pretty good suspense drama that the cast does full justice to.

All but ignored when it came out in theaters, "The Third Day" is actually a good suspense film very much in the Hitchcock mode. It tells the story of a man accused of killing his mistress in a car accident, in which he was also injured. The problem is, the accident's left him an amnesiac, and, by the time the story is pieced together and the killer's identity revealed, both the protagonists and the audience have been through the emotional ringer.The performances are all quite good, from then-husband and wife George Peppard and Elizabeth Ashley as the protagonist and his understanding wife, to Roddy MacDowall as Peppard's less-than-honest younger brother, who may know more about the case than he's letting on, to a young Sally Kellerman as the mistress (in flashback), to Dame Mona Washbourne and, in his last role, Herbert Marshall as Peppard and MacDowall's parents. The only casting that doesn't really ring true is a pre-"Laugh-In" Arte Johnson as a sleazy blackmailer. Perhaps it's because he's so thought of as a comic actor, but he just doesn't convince as a heavy.It's been almost twenty years since I saw this film, but it's obviously made an indelible impression. It's an absolute "must" if you like good suspense.