In Romancing the Stone (1984), Michael Douglas plays the part of someone seeking a valuable gem while making love to a beautiful woman in a tropical setting. In Don’t Say a Word, Dr. Nathan Conrad (played by Michael Douglas) searches for a gem in New York City as the ransom to save the life of his daughter Jessie (played by Skye McCole Bartusiak), who has been kidnapped by Patrick Coster (played by Sean Bean), who has just been released from prison. The tale begins in November 1991, when a Brooklyn bank vault is robbed of a gem by a team of high-tech criminals. Through a double-cross, one of the team places the gem in her eight-year-old daughter’s doll, but dies when Coster pursues him to his death on the tracks of a New York subway. The daughter, Elisabeth, then goes to Hart Island in the East River, where her father is to be buried; she places the doll in his grave, marked only by a sequence number. For the next ten years, she feigns mental illness, going from one institution to another, until she (now played by Brittany Murphy) is brought to a facility where Dr. Conrad once worked. A former colleague assigns the case to Dr. Conrad, who delays his return home to his wife, bedridden with a broken leg, to handle the case. On the following morning, Thanksgiving, Dr. Conrad awakens to learn that his daughter has been kidnapped. A telephone call from Coster informs him that he has until 5 p.m. to find “a number” from Elisabeth, and tells him “Don’t say a word” to the authorities. Dr. Conrad must then solve a puzzle, as the kidnapper gives no clues about the robbery, Hart Island, or what the number represents. As Dr. Conrad follows his pursuit, the tension rises, but ultimately he finds out about the robbery from Elisabeth, so he takes her past security, hijacks a motorboat, and lands on Hart Island in order to jog her memory. The kidnapper arrives on the island to find the doll, whereupon he intends to kill everyone, so there is a fight between Dr. Conrad and Coster, but filmviewers are never in doubt about the outcome of Don’t Say a Word. Directed by Gary Fleder; the screenplay is based on the novel of the same title by Andrew Klavan. However, there is one unanswered puzzle. Why Elisabeth was shunted from one mental institution to another all that time while fooling everyone as to her sanity? The answer that filmviewers will ponder as they leave the cinema is that psychiatry has become less a matter of conversation in recent years than of pills, which sometimes create rather than solve a realistic mental problem. MH