Fritz Lang (1947)

When Celia (Joan Bennett), a moneyed New Yorker on holiday in Mexico, encounters an architect called Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave), it’s love at first sight.  It’s also love with discordant notes, right from the start.  Celia and her yappy friend Edith (Natalie Schafer) have just witnessed the alarming (but, for Celia, also exciting) overture to a fight between two Mexicans over a woman.  Celia feels Mark’s presence, his eyes looking at her, before she sees who they belong to.  Once they’ve married after a whirlwind romance and move to the Lamphere family home (a huge pile, although the family’s old money has been draining away), Mark’s secrets start coming out:  a first Mrs Lamphere, who died in mysterious circumstances; a teenage son David (Mark Dennis) he’d not mentioned; a series of rooms within the family mansion which are meticulously detailed reconstructions of rooms in which various murders, on different continents and in different centuries, took place – murders of women by men.  Mark’s main hang-up turns out to be that he feels he’s been dominated all his life by women.   As well as his late mother and first wife, there’s his elder sister Caroline (Anne Revere), who manages the household, and Miss Robey (Barbara O’Neil), a sort of governess who, some years ago, saved David’s life in a fire that broke out in the mansion.  IMDB describes Secret Beyond the Door, made halfway through Fritz Lang’s career in Hollywood, as a ‘Freudian version of the Bluebeard tale’.

This is the kind of story where, if you accept the psychological premise that provides the dramatic motor, the denouement is almost bound to undermine it and be unconvincing.   Celia, by now convinced that Mark is planning to murder her, tells him she’d rather die at his hand than live without him.  It’s revealed that, one traumatising evening during his childhood, Mark’s sister, not his mother, locked him in.  Miss Robey’s unrequited love for her employer expresses itself in pyromania (again).  All these things seem bound to vindicate Mark’s neurosis and reinforce his complex rather than cause him to snap out of it – just as well that Lang and the screenwriter Silvia Richards (working from a story by Rufus King) are honest enough to half-admit this in the final scene.   ‘That night you killed the root of the evil in me’, Mark tells Celia, ‘but I still have a long way to go’.  ‘We have a long way to go’, she replies.  Still, the look of the film, photographed by Stanley Cortez, and the curious chemistry of the leads make Secret Beyond the Door an effective psychological thriller.  Joan Bennett and Michael Redgrave don’t connect to the sensuous imagery of the Mexican sequences or to the noir shadows of the Lamphere home yet that lack of connection is rather intriguing.   The corridors and artefacts that line the staircase dominate the characters, expressing the extent of Mark’s dark past which Celia has to confront and his own imprisonment in it.

Michael Redgrave’s Mark is handsome but chilly and Joan Bennett’s Celia is not that glamorous but both succeed in creating intelligent people – and in using their intelligence as actors to convince you that Celia and Mark are fascinated by each other because they’re unusual, because there’s more to them than meets the eye.  In her smaller role as the sister, Anne Revere achieves something similar.  As David, the sixteen-year-old Mark Dennis has a truly weird smile and one of those has-it-broken-or-hasn’t-it voices that give posh teenagers in films of this era an unsettling androgynous quality.  Silvia Richards’ screenplay contains a great many words – plenty of them spoken in voiceover by Joan Bennett.   It’s sometimes frustrating:  Bennett is able to show you what she’s thinking without also telling you but she handles the lines skilfully.  Some of Richards’ dialogue is a bit too literate but at least there’s plenty of wit in the exchanges.   Lang doesn’t really need Miklos Rozsa’s explanatory score:  it adds to the melodramatic fun but the film is scarier in its rare unaccompanied moments.

26 December 2011