The Walking Stick

A romantico-psychological thriller, with fine, persuasively detailed performances from Eggar as a crippled girl with a sexual chip on her shoulder, and Hemmings as the enigmatic artist who melts it, gradually persuading her to abandon the walking-stick on which she has leaned since a childhood bout with polio, but also leading her to a dark brink of crime and betrayal. Rather too stolidly directed by Till, with meticulous fidelity to Winston Graham's novel, it is reminiscent enough of Marnie (also from a novel by Graham) - here, rather than the colour red, the heroine's problem is a claustrophobic aftermath of her time in an iron lung - to make one wonder whether Hitchcock could have screwed excitement out of the situation as well as sympathetic character studies.