Secret Beyond the Door [Remastered Special Edition] [DVD]

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Not-So-Harmless Villain: The viewer is led to believe that Miss Robey is a Red Herring Mole, especially after her secret is revealed halfway through the film. However, later, it becomes apparent that Miss Robey is prepared to kill for revenge. 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. The Blue Beard: Mark's last wealthy wife, Eleanor, died under his care. He also "collects" rooms where murders have taken place, especially where husbands have killed their wives. I'm late to the conversation but I watched this movie as well when it aired a couple weeks ago. I thought this movie was odd, but I strangely liked it. The ending reminded me of Rebecca, but it also seemed so random. If Barbara O'Neil's character was supposed to be like Mrs. Danvers, I wish that she'd been featured more. I think that Fritz Lang could have easily combined Barbara O'Neil and Anne Revere's characters into a single Mrs. Danvers-esque character. Neither woman's character really seemed all that important to the overall storyline. I was so used to seeing Revere playing the dour humorless woman, that seeing her in a contemporary setting and actually smiling was somewhat off-putting. I get that her character was older than Michael Redgrave's and that he'd spent his entire life being controlled by a woman, whether it was his mother or his sister; but I wished that her presence was more ominous, more creepy. O'Neil was just a weird character and she didn't really lend anything to the story, other than her being employed by Redgrave out of guilt more than anything else. I was happy when Redgrave's son left the story. This is terrible, but his voice got on my nerves and I didn't want to hear it anymore. Alma intercepts her daughter, Dee Fillcot, as she is about to leave for work when she notices that her uniform is in need of repair. Dee confesses that she overheard Alma and Bertram's conversation and explains that prospective members are only considered if they are nominated by an existing member. Alma doesn't personally know any existing club members besides Rita Castillo, but she fears that Rita doesn't remember her. Despite her mother's reservations, Dee encourages her to try speaking with Rita.

Elsewhere the characterisations are intriguing. Mark is troubled by something and we learn it's about women in his life, while his "hobby" of reconstructing famous murder scenes in the rooms of the mansion, is macabre and really puts a kinky distortion in the narrative. Celia marries in haste but is surprisingly strong, her character arc given heft by the fact we think she may well be prepared to die for love. Then there's the house secretary, Miss Robey (O'Neil), a shifty woman with a headscarf covering an unsightly scar on one side of her face, and Mark's young son David (Mark Dennis) who is cold and detached and has some disturbing theories on his father's means and motivations. Jones, Clydefro (November 16, 2011). "Secret Beyond the Door". The Digital Fix . Retrieved February 20, 2015.Then the trouble started. The censor (or maybe the U.S. government) trampled all over Lang's next film, an anti-fascist warning about the postwar threat of atomic power, Cloak and Dagger. The film's final act was removed just before release, obscuring the entire point of Albert Maltz and Ring Lardner, Jr.'s script. Another take on the BLUEBEARD/REBECCA type storyline from German auteur Fritz Lang, although I have to say that this is one of his worst movies. The story involves an idealistic young bride who marries a handsome man and moves into his ancestral home only to discover that he's hiding some very dark secrets. Who is the mysterious scarred woman in his home, and what secret is lurking behind door number seven? This 1948 film-noir has one big advantage…and one slight disadvantage. The advantage is that it was directed by Fritz Lang. And everyone only mildly interested in cinema knows that this man was responsible for some of the most mesmerizing milestones of early cinema. 'M', 'Metropolis' or 'Dr. Mabuse' are titles that can easily be considered masterpieces and I'm sure that I'm not the only person who watched 'Secret Beyond the Door' mostly because Lang directed it. The disadvantage is that….it was directed by Fritz Lang! For all the above stated reasons, you automatically have high expectations and this film – even though an intelligent and professionally elaborated movie – simply can't redeem them. * * * spoilers * * * After the sudden death of her beloved brother, Celia (Joan Bennett) goes on a vacation to Mexico where she falls head over heels in love with the handsome Mark (Michael Redgrave). Without giving it much consideration, the couple gets married. Shortly after, Mark becomes rude, more distant and sometimes even disrespectful towards Celia. When Mark all of sudden has to leave for business matters, Celia even discovers an entire past of Mark. He was married before, has a son and keeps several secrets for everyone! The most intriguing one is a forbidden room in his mansion… * * * end spoilers * * * Mark is disturbed at the unequal height of the two candles in the bedroom. Celia receives the copy of the key she had made to the seventh room, enters it and recognizes it as an exact duplicate of her and Mark’s bedroom. She concludes that it does indeed commemorate the death of Eleanor until she notices that the dresser candles are uneven in the same way they are in the real bedroom now. The room is to display not Mark’s past murder of Eleanor but his future murder of her. She runs away. 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.

The supernatural suggestion goes even further when Celia flees the mansion into a fogbound grove of trees, only to see a menacing male figure approaching through the mist, like Death himself. It isn't too much of a leap to theorize that this scene (just three or four shots) inspired one of the nightmares in the cult horror classic Dementia/Daugher of Horror. The fact that other details express the less palatable beliefs of the 1940s does not help either. Mark's "poetic" talk consists mainly of sexist comments. Men think but women intuit; men are human and women are animals. Miss Robey, with her scarred face, leaps right out of psych 101, while Caroline's all-accepting calm isn't reassuring in the least. Secret Beyond the Door is a 1948 Film Noir thriller directed by Fritz Lang, starring Joan Bennett and Michael Redgrave. She meets there three people whose existence she had not suspected: her husband's sister, who has been running things and wants to carry on (does anyone remember Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers in 'Rebecca'?); his secretary, who had hoped to marry him, and always wears a scarf round her face to hide scars from a fire; and his rather hostile son, who had no more been mentioned than the fact of a previous marriage… Starring Joan Bennett, Michael Redgrave, Anne Revere, Barbara O'Neil, Natalie Schafer, Paul Cavanagh, Bob Dwight .

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

The 1940s kept all of its nastiest secrets in noir, and that’s what makes watching film noir so rewarding. It’s the history lessons. Rufus King's novel Museum Piece No. Thirteen, upon which the film was based, also appeared in the Dec 1945 issue of Red Book magazine under the title The Secret Beyond the Door. The film opens with a voice-over narration spoken by Joan Bennett. Contemporary sources indicate that British actor Michael Redgrave made his U.S. film debut in the picture, although RKO's production of Mourning Becomes Electra (see above), which Redgrave filmed immediately afterward, was released just prior to Secret Beyond the Door. According to contemporary sources, director Fritz Lang wanted Milton Krasner as director of photography, but Bennett, a partner with Lang and producer Walter Wanger in Diana Productions, insisted that Stanley Cortez be used. Contemporary sources reveal Lang's first choice for Mark Lamphere was James Mason. In addition, modern sources note that Ring Larder, Jr. was initially considered as the film's screenwriter and that the final script, by Silvia Richards and Lang (uncredited), took nearly a year to complete.

Even though it's not a paranoid woman film, The Stranger (1946, Orson Welles) sees Loretta Young fling herself from doubt to indecision, unable to handle truth of any sort. Even when Edward G. Robinson FORCES HER to watch footage of Nazi concentration camps (pretty bold for 1946) she still refuses to accept the villainy that's staring her in the face, probably because the villainy is in that most precious of American sanctums, the suburban family home.

Classic Film Noir

A troubled production and troubling reactions to it by the critics and Lang himself! Secret Beyond the Door is very much in the divisive half of Lang's filmic output. Taking its lead from classic era Hollywood's keen interest with all things Freudian, and doffing its cap towards a number of "women in peril at home" films of the 1940s, it's a picture that's hardly original. Yet in spite of some weaknesses in the screenplay that revolve around the psychological troubles of Mark Lamphere, this is still a fascinating and suspenseful picture. Art Shift: Mark's Inner Monologue about his guilt is filmed as a courtroom scene in which Mark acts as both prosecutor and defendant in front of a faceless judge and jury. This film sees Mark (Michael Redgrave) with a psychological problem. There are a few things wrong in his head, eg, he collects rooms where murders have been committed. He lays these rooms out exactly as they were, with original artifacts, at the time the murders were committed and devotes a wing of his house to them. When Celia (Joan Bennett) marries him, she only discovers his passion when a rain storm ruins the outside house-warming party they are giving, and he brings the guests indoors for a tour of the house.