Le secret derrière la porte

Pseudo-Hitch intriguing drama about a woman who gradually realizes she is married to a killer and may be next on his list .This classic suspense film contains emotion , intrigue , chills, and evocative scenarios . When a lovely as well as wealthy heiress named Celia (Joan Bennett) spends a fun holiday she meets a good-looking guy called Mark Lamphere and ends up falling in love with him . Later on , she marries the widower (Michael Redgrave's first American film) and finds out weird happenings about him . She and her new husband, settle in an ancient mansion on the East coast, she discovers he may want to kill her . Understandably , she wonders what plans he might have for her . The mansion has got a lot of rooms that are replicas of known murder sites . In the tour of the three rooms, Mark Lamphere recounts the tales of three murders, all of which are fictional. However in the first room, he mentions the St Bartholomew's Day massacre and the Guise family in France. The massacre is a real historical event, where French Roman Catholics attacked French Huguenots (Protestants) on 24th of August 1572 resulting in many deaths.

Dazzling Hitch/style suspense movie about a beautiful woman marries a rare man with a shock revelation around every corner their mansion . It packs hallucination , treason , Bennett plays a rich wife trying to help her hubby , well played by Michael Redgrave , who is suffering from amnesia and who might be a murderer too . The picture takes elements from classic Hitchcock films , carrying out a crossover among ¨Suspicion ¨, ¨Spellbound¨ and ¨Rebeca¨ . In fact ,Fritz Lang's attempt to do his version of Rebeca (1940) was a project fraught with disaster. It ran over budget and over schedule, while Lang was at constant loggerheads with his leading lady, Joan Bennett . As it stars the great Joan Bennett , being compellingly directed by Lang ; but it is not as outstanding as their former movies together : ¨Man hunt¨, ¨The woman in the window¨ and ¨Scarlet street¨. Support cast is pretty good such as Anne Revere as Caroline Lamphere , Barbara O'Neil as Miss Robey and Paul Cavanagh as Rick Barrett .

Atmospheric as well as mistly cinematography in black and white by Stanley Cortez . Thrilling and frightening musical score by the classic Miklos Rozsa . The motion picture was professionally directed by Fritz Lang . Lang directed masterfully all kind of genres as Noir cinema as ¨Big heat , Scarlet Street and Beyond a reasonable doubt¨ , Epic as ¨Nibelungs¨, suspense as ¨Secret beyond the door, Clash by night¨ , Western as ¨Rancho Notorious and Return of Frank James ¨ and of course Adventure as ¨Moonfleet¨ .

I enjoyed it much more the second time around. At first it was far too unbelievable. It hardly made any sense then and I never felt I cared what happened. I bought the video because of Joan Bennett and Fritz Lang making another film noir. Now when i saw it, I loved it and just sat back enjoyed all the hokus-pokus fluff that is delivered quite seriously. It´s supposed to be like "Rebecca" and that´s why I didn´t like it the first time. Too many plot holes! There´s even an exotic ms. Danvers type around with a veil...Too much!

Why would Joan marry and stay with someone so utterly stiff and charmless as Michael Redgrave?? The male lead should have been given to someone more mysterious and attractive. They were hoping for a new Laurence Olivier...

Joan is a treat as always. I love how she comes across as a spoiled debutante who can hardly care to utter her lines with any conviction. She´s a good actress -just a bit too laid back at times. I love her, she is so stunningly beautiful and cool in her Hollywood wardrobes.

I love the whole atmosphere of the movie. It´s slow at first and then from the honeymoon in Mexico and forward so mysterious! I love her bedroom with the tapestry! The thing with the room-collecting was quite farfetched but fun. Who would REALLY aquire complete scenes of murders at home???? I´m going to see it again soon and learn some lines. They don´t make them like they used to!

Rather tepid 1940s thriller. Joan Bennett is beautiful, however, as is the cinematography. Really strikingly shot, which makes it well worth watching; it is reminiscent of Spellbound in parts, with a surreal edge to some of the backdrops.

The story, very loosely based on the old Bluebeard fairy tale, is interesting, but the pacing of the film is off, and you never really feel much tension. There are some interesting characters in the house, especially the secretary, but they aren't very developed. So much more could have been done in this area, to make it a truly great film.

Without giving anything away, I doubt many of us would have made the same decision that the main characters did in the end. But don't let that distract you from the truly beautiful fashion of this film.

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.

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.