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

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When Mark does show up he exhibits an entirely different personality, acting alternately nervous and angry. An elaborate open house initially breaks the mood until Mark decides to show his guests his personally designed "felicitous rooms". Celia has heard of these and expects them to be happy places. They are instead elaborate shrines to notorious murder scenes through history, a macabre gallery of horrors. If that's not enough, the Levender Falls house has a room #7 that nobody is allowed to enter. Now half convinced that she has married a madman, Celia determines to discover for herself the secret beyond the door. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one, because I'm a fan of Fritz Lang and Joan Bennett. Mommy Issues: Mark had a troubled relationship with his mother, and in fact with every other woman in his life. Hollywood Fire: The one from which Mark rescues Celia at the end and thereby redeems himself in her eyes.

What makes Secret Beyond the Door... fascinating is Lang's excellent direction of individual scenes, and the strikingly beautiful cinematography of Stanley Cortez, that finds all manner of strange shadow patterns in both the Mexican honeymoon getaway and Mark Lamphere's House of Usher Felicitous Rooms. 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. Secret Beyond the Door..." is a reworking of "Rebecca". While there are plenty of differences, there are enough similarities that you can assume the Daphne Du Maurier was the starting point for the story from "Secret Beyond the Door...". However, there's one huge difference, one that makes the later film harder to enjoy. In "Rebecca", the new wife was naive, young and a bit dim. In "Secret", she (Joan Bennett) is supposed to be much more worldly, educated and older....and so her actions really don't make a lot of sense.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. 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. It's a funny thing but this film really grows on you after you've seen it a few times. In fact, on a third outing I found it quite disturbing. Admittedly the viewings were separated by some years but the initial response of disappointment and belief that it was not a typical Lang film have now changed with the latest sighting to a conviction that here indeed is the typical Fritz. You see I have now discounted some of the initial feelings about it being just a women's soap opera with Babs O'Neil making a fair fist of a sort of poor woman's Mrs Danvers. 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 thing is somewhat like Rebecca, in a way. There is an impulsive marriage of a young woman, Celia (Joan Bennett) to a mysterious man, Mark (Michael Redgrave). After the marriage Celia finds out he has been married before, except this time, there is a son by that marriage. And her husband has a personal assistant who is facially deformed and is prone to setting fires. However, Celia is not like Rebecca. She is full of life and not unsure of herself at all. The narrator introduces a woman named Alma Fillcot, a housewife with dreams of becoming a member of the exclusive Elysian Park Garden Club. Dark and Troubled Past: It is Implied that something traumatic happened in Mark's childhood which turned his love for his mother to hatred and made him unbalanced, and caused his first marriage to fail. Ultimately Subverted. The incident that traumatised Mark was a mundane prank played by his sister Caroline, which Mark wrongly attributed to his mother. 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.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.

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... All Girls Want Bad Boys: Played With. Celia has an unconventional side and is drawn to Mark's unusual ways. But she is genuinely alarmed by his sudden mood swings and dark secrets.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.