Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

To me, this movie is perfection.

How sad is this?

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I think I would have enjoyed this story better if I'd read the novel it is based on ("The Full Treatment") or as a radio drama play that trimmed down the extraneous elements and didn't exhaust my patience the way this movie does. The story had promise (in spite of a psychological premise that hasn't aged well since 1960), but in the end the director and the writer couldn't quite make it work.There is some excellent stuff here and there - I think that the opening shot that pulls back from a car radio playing a happy tune to seamlessly reveal a scene of disaster and carnage is good enough to redeem the problems with the remaining 2 hours of screenplay. But there's an awful lot to get through in the next 2 hours, and a lot of it is a slog.I've liked Ronald Lewis since I saw his role as the chauffeur in another Hammer production, "Scream of Fear!", and I when I saw that he was going to be prominently featured in this one, I was looking forward to seeing him stretch out. But his character is high-strung and unlikeable (even though it seems that his terrible behavior is caused by what we would now call "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder") and sometimes the director can't get him off the screen fast enough for me. Lewis is out there front and center, chewing the scenery in a thankless role and I can't help but wonder if this picture damaged his career, or at least slowed it down some. The other problem, of course, is that the whole "repressed memories leading to murder" thing has lost most of its credibility over the decades, sapping some of the drama and energy from the proceedings on screen. As this tale of psychodrama among the jet-set spins out, the thought kept intruding - "This has nothing to say to my life". Oddly, that never comes up in "Scream Of Fear!", possibly because the heroine is a "poor little rich girl" who is wheelchair bound and seemingly fragile. But the black and white photography is crisp.There are some great visual setups (oddly, the driving scenes are the least convincing scenes in the movie, ironic considering the Lewis' character is a race car driver). Diane Cilantro is adorable and a pleasure to simply behold (although her character is missing from the middle third of the movie).And there is a fascinating contribution from Francois Rosay who is on screen for maybe 5 minutes altogether, but who pulls the final climax together with a wordless performance that is in some ways the strongest in the movie. So, did I like it? Not nearly as much as the similar "Scream Of Fear!". Did the movie have a lot of things to redeem the problems with the plot and the unlikeable protagonist? You bet.

Although its running time, foreign locations, widescreen photography by top British cameraman Gilbert Taylor and international cast mark this out as one of the more ambitious productions on Hammer's production slate for 1960, 'The Full Treatment' (to give it it's original British title) remains one of Hammer's most obscure productions; and you'll know why once you've seen it.Directed for all its worth by the usually reliable Val Guest, you keep wondering where all this earnest talk about Ronald Lewis's psychological (and sexual!) problems is actually leading (his hair-trigger temper comes across more as boorishness than emotional turmoil), and waiting for evidence of some sort of diabolical plot to emerge to justify listening to all this talk. The stunning Diane Cilento is amazing as usual, and fleetingly appears topless, but - oh dear! - that accent! Claude Dauphin has the most entertainingly written part, but the script's relentless determination to withhold the final 'twist' until absolutely the last possible moment simply tries the patience as various clues to upcoming plot developments - like the emphasis on the cable car - are sledge-hammered into the plot. The final 'revelation' about the motivation of one of the main characters had been so obviously telegraphed that it came as an acute disappointment when it proved not to be the simple red herring I had hoped for, but the film's punchline.

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.

Val Guest directed this psychological suspense yarn about a race car driver(played by Ronald Lewis) who is having huge stress issues after nearly cracking up in a car race. He takes his wife(played by Diane Cilento) on a trip to the South of France for a vacation, but is still plagued by stress and other psychological issues, so agrees to see a psychiatrist(played by Claude Dauphin) but complications ensue, as things(of course) are not all that they seem. Misfired attempt at suspense has a good cast but is fatally overlong and far too talky, with nothing in the story justifying this over-length, as film becomes quite tedious.