Secret Beyond the Door...

The Secret Beyond the Door is Fritz Lang's melodramatic suspense tale that seems to have taken more than it's fair share of influence from Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca. Before the story even starts, we're waiting to find out one thing - what's the secret? This somewhat puts the movie on the back foot from the start, as all that we see is build up to the big finale, which basically means that the pay off has to be pretty good otherwise the whole film will fall apart. The final twist, in fact, doesn't really do the build up justice; but it's not absolutely terrible, and I would still rate this film as at least 'good', but just don't tune in expecting anything brilliant. This is certainly no 'M', for example. The plot follows a young woman that goes on holiday and meets a charming middle-aged man. The two later get married and she accompanies him back to his house where she meets his son, and finds his collection of rooms, one of which is kept locked up. What is the secret beyond the door...?

Fritz Lang's bleak cinematography and haunting use of music help to create the atmosphere that a story of this nature needs in order to work effectively. The focus on the door helps to create the tension as to what the secret is throughout the movie, and Fritz Lang seems keen to capitalise on that as we see Joan Bennett's narration change from how she feels personally to driving herself crazy as she tries to decipher what's behind the door. The characters in the story are interesting, and they need to be as this film is mostly character based. We follow Celia Lamphere, and we are given her thoughts by way of the aforementioned narration. Narration is often found in scripts that have been written by people that don't know how to write good scripts. However, in this case it actually helps the film to move along. In order for the story to work, we need to know what the character is feeling, so in this case narration is helpful to the story.

As I've mentioned, the ending isn't all that good, but the suspense builds nicely and there's much to like about this film. If you're new to Fritz Lang, though, I certainly recommend the classics 'M' and 'Metropolis' before this, and also from his American films; 'Fury', 'Scarlet Street', 'Beyond a Reasonable Doubt' and 'While the City Sleeps' get my thumbs up.

Fritz Lang's "Secret Beyond the Door" is a moderately interesting noir. The story, like "The Uninvited" and "Shining Victory" is reminiscent of Hitchcock's film "Rebecca." I say Hitchcock's film and not DuMaurier's 1938 novel, because surprisingly, the novel only sold 20,000 copies and was not a success. I imagine the film changed that.

The story concerns a beautiful woman, Celia (Joan Bennett) who falls madly in love with a mysterious and moody man, Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave) whom she meets while on a trip. She goes to live with him at the family home, which is run by his sister (Anne Revere). It's there she discovers a few things. One is that Mark was married before, is a widower, and has a son (Mark Dennis). Mark also has a secretary (Barbara O'Neil) who covers one side of her face with a scarf to cover a scar from a fire. Mark, she finds, also has a wing where he houses a collection of rooms in which famous murders have taken place. There is one room, however, which is always kept locked. Celia wants to know what's beyond that door, and what makes her husband so moody.

"Beyond the Door" takes inspiration from two other Hitchcock films, Spellbound and Notorious, and taps into the postwar interest in psychology. There is a voice-over narration from the troubled Celia, who recounts her dreams. The film is very atmospheric, the music grand and suspenseful and, though one may be able to guess how it ends, the story is very intriguing. The ending, due to some narrative gaps, is somewhat disappointing.

This isn't Lang's best film but one can certainly see the master's touch in the gloom, the fixation on the door, and the cinematography. Joan Bennett (whom I saw in person and was unbelievably tiny) shines as she usually did under Lang's direction. She could play both sophisticated and glamorous as well as trashy and sweet-smart. Here, in a funny way, she combines both - the character is a bit of a classy femme fatale. Redgrave is properly passionate one minute and distant and a little weird the next. I would have loved to have seen someone like Dirk Bogarde tackle this role a few years later.

Derivative but very good.

Fritz Lang's creepy and atmospheric psychological thriller, 'Secret Beyond the Door (1948),' faces just one major obstacle that prevents it from being a completely satisfying film experience: the story is quite obviously derived from Hitchcock's 'Rebecca (1940),' which happens to be a superior film in almost every regard. This is not to question the talents or originality of Lang, since, of course, he was already an established director before Hitchcock ever got his break, but you can just tell how much this particular work was influenced by the Master of Suspense. Borrowing elements from the then-prevalent film noir movement, and adding shades of post-marriage paranoia from the likes of 'Rebecca' and Cukor's 'Gaslight (1944),' Lang also mixes in snippets of Freudian psychoanalysis, not unlike what I witnessed last week in Hitchcock's own 'Spellbound (1945).' The final product is not without its charm, and contains various moments of precisely-articulated suspense, but you can never overcome that niggling feeling that you've seen it all done better.

Joan Bennett plays Celia, a young lady who acquires a large amount of money after her brother's death and decides to take a holiday. It is here that she meets Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave), a mysterious and charming gentleman who excites in Celia intense suppressed feelings of rebellion and exhilaration. Following their marriage, a hastily-decided proposition that can only lead to trouble, Celia immediately begins to notice peculiarities in her new husband, and, after her arrival at Mark's extravagant residence, she finds the dwelling haunted by the shadow of his previous wife. Mark, it seems, houses an unhealthy preoccupation with murder, and has made a hobby out of collecting entire rooms in which unspeakable atrocities of passion were committed. But what of the one room that is kept securely locked, never to be opened by anyone? Celia concludes that the secret to unlocking the inner depths of her husband's disturbed mind lies within that single room, beyond the forbidden door. Though Silvia Richards' screenplay, from a story by Rufus King, often seems too incredible to take seriously, Lang's film remains an interesting achievement, and is nothing if not entertaining.

I found the promotional material for 'Secret Beyond the Door' to be grossly misleading. The image of Joan Bennett standing before a significantly-distorted door prompted me to expect a film of extreme German Expressionism, in the same vein as 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).' Fritz Lang, who developed his career in Germany during the 1920s, and having often used elements of the style, would presumably have been very adept at recreating the devilishly-twisted labyrinths of the human mind, but the only scene to even approach my stylistic expectations was the appropriately ambiguous and shadowy dream sequence, in which Michael Redgrave both prosecutes and defends his malevolent tendencies in court {this particular scene may even have influenced Hitchcock's heavily-stylised courtroom trial in 'Dial M for Murder (1954)}. The remainder of the film has the appearance of a typical 1940s film noir, with suitably shadowy cinematography by Stanley Cortez, supplemented by a voice-over by Joan Bennett. Also note the similarity between the character of Miss Robey (Barbara O'Neil) and Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) from 'Rebecca,' most particularly in their respective final actions in each picture.

Celia Barrett is a New Yorker with a trust fund and one of the city's most eligible single women. On a trip to Mexico she meets and falls for the charming Mark Lamphere, and later the couple marry. Returning to his home and pushing him to let her finance his passion for collecting "rooms", Celia starts to suspect that all might not be right with this perfect man she has landed and indeed the secrets in his house and in his past soon start to mount.

I watched this on the back of positive reviews from a couple of people on this site; perhaps I should have read further though because I didn't find the wonderfully intelligent noir that they claimed to have seen. Perhaps these commentators have not seen the film Rebecca which sort of covers similar themes but does it much, much better than this film does, but for me I found it hard to care about this. Visually I liked it and credit to Lang because his direction and work with his cinematographer does produce some really well set up scenes that do have great atmosphere. However this is not repeated in the material which is not as intelligent as it would like to think itself. Indeed it is terribly overwrought and melodramatic and offers little to counter it.

As a result the cast have to thanklessly play it up the best they can. I thought than Bennett did as good a job as she could have hoped to have done. She isn't brilliant though but she plays detective well. More important but not much cop is Redgrave; OK the blame lies more on the material than in his performance but given how little was conveyed by words at times, his performance was important but not up to the task.

Overall then, a fairly overdone melodrama that doesn't really convince in how it uses psychoanalysis to inform and direct its narrative. It may look great but the substance just isn't there from the start right down to the insultingly simplistic final scene.

Highly derivative this low-budget film noir thriller may be but with Fritz Lang at the helm, you forget the ridiculous plot and admire instead the cinematography and atmosphere he brings to proceedings. And when I say ridiculous, I mean it, how else to describe a storyline where a widowed architect marries a wealthy city girl and takes her to his big old house in the country where he's made over a number of the rooms into murder tableaux. You might think she'd look for the door marked "Exit", but no Joan Bennett herself gets obsessed with the one room he's locked up, the mysterious number 7 and before too long is making a copy of the key, so she can investigate, naturally at the dead of night.

Being the 40's the Freudian overtones are overpowering, as the husband, Michael Redgrave in his first Hollywood role, seems to be over-reacting to years of unhealthy female influence and dominance in his life as his mood swings like, well, I guess you'd say, a door.

In the background there's an apparently disfigured housekeeper Miss Robey, Redgrave's supportive sister and his difficult, moody son but the main tension is between the leads as it builds gradually to a fiery ending.

The plot may creak at times like an old floorboard, Redgrave and Bennett are somewhat stiff and cold in their parts and the continuity isn't all it could be, but if like me you like film noir settings then this is for you too. Thus we get Bennett's interior monologues, lots of shots of her in front of mirrors, lots of scenes with darkened doors and symbolic keys, and even a shroud-like mist followed by a thunderstorm on the climactic night. There are some great shots of starkly-lit corridors and a wonderfully imaginative dream sequence (yes, it has those too) of Redgrave's where he's prosecuting himself in front of a judge and jury whose faces are in shadow. Dmitri Tiompkin's atmospheric score adds a lot to the overall mystery and dread, particularly at the end.

This may not be Lang's best American film but there was more than enough in it to keep an avowed fan like me keenly watching.