The Walking Stick is a 1970 British crime drama film directed by Eric Till and starring David Hemmings and Samantha Eggar.

Her rigid and controlled life is transformed when she meets a struggling artist, Leigh Hartley, at a party she begrudgingly attends to please her parents.

Soon, Deborah finds herself coerced into physically participating in the heist when a guard the thieves had bribed into allowing them entrance inside the antiques shop takes ill.

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "A knowingly detailed, beautifully acted portrayal of deceit and the failure of love, enclosing another little essay in abnormal female psychology from a novel by Winston Graham.

Where the trigger to Marnie's psychosis was a sudden suffusion of the colour red, Deborah Dainton's fear of enclosed spaces and close physical contact is awakened by an after-image of her early confinement inside an iron lung.

These occasional interior reminders apart, The Walking Stick insists on the necessity, and the final sickening fallibility, of drawing mental/emotional seismographs almost entirely from a reading of surface indications.

Eric Till has worked so well with his cast, with both David Hemmings and Samantha Eggar giving perhaps their best performances, in creating the solemn intricacies of trust that the film's more self-conscious drawing of implications – the frozen frame shot when Deborah is persuaded to part with her stick, the slow tracking away from the couple in Leigh's studio until they are left in one small pool of light in a corner of the darkened screen – although well controlled, come to seem quite superfluous.

"[4] Leslie Halliwell said: "Slow moving character romance which has its heart in the right place but too often promises supense which never comes, and is made in a chintzy cigarette commercial style.