Moviecut—Secret Beyond the Door...

source: Secret Beyond the Door...

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. One night, shortly after their marriage, Mark, an architect, talks about how he "collects" rooms as a hobby at a party at their house. Before the guests go look at the rooms, Celia tells the guests how her husband has said in the past that happy occasions are often tied to the rooms in which they occur. However, this tour is not one of happy events, instead all of the rooms are replicas of rooms in which grisly murders have occurred, and the new husband has the murders and the rooms down to the last detail. The look on Celia's face shows that she is suddenly wondering what exactly is going on in the head of that husband of hers. And then one more secret..there is a door where Mark is working away on another replica room where Bennett is not allowed to go. Then one day she manages to get in and finds....I'll let you watch and find out. Let me just say if not for the great visual style of Lang, the fact that Michael Redgrave had a knack for being creepy when he wants to and Joan Bennett could aptly project just about any emotion, and don't forget the score, this thing would have been a total washout, because the ideas are not that original and the ending is just not all that it was built up to be, given all of the wind machines, at least not for me.

"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. When the film begins, Celia is being castigated by her brother for not settling down and getting married. She tells him she's having too much fun...and has no plans to settle down. Then, inexplicably, she meets a man and almost immediately marries him...though she knows little about Mark (Michael Redgrave). Well, soon after, she learns that he completely misrepresented himself--he'd already been married AND he had a teenage son. These things he casually 'forgot' to tell Celia. At the same time, Mark has gone from clever and sweet to a dark, brooding and obnoxious guy....with apparently little love for Celia. Now at this point, what would any sane woman do? They certainly would NOT stay...and as more and more evidence mounts up that Mark might be insane and dangerous, Celia stays!! Even when he shows off his 'murder rooms'--recreation of rooms where various women were murdered---she stays! Does this make sense? Nope. Did it work in "Rebecca"....well, a heck of a lot better than in this moody, atmospheric but ultimately goofy film that makes little sense. Add to that some inane narration as Celia speaks her mind aloud during much of the movie and you've got a film that looks good but leaves the viewer frustrated...frustrated at how dumb Celia is AND at how there's little in the way of subtlety or intelligence behind all this. Despite some quality actors and a famous director (Fritz Lang), it's a bad movie that LOOKS good...with lovely cinematography, music and an appropriate mood. Too bad it didn't even end well as has Celia playing armchair psychologist and attempting to cure her psychotic hubby!

It's a mystery why warm, wealthy, beautiful Joan Bennett marries diffident, tense, aloof Michael Redgrave (who seems awfully miscast), but love is mysterious. Stanley Cortez's moody lighting and noirish photography certainly help us through the long talky passages, and the pseudo-Freudian faffing about, as Joan tries to unravel the murky secrets of the house she's married into. It's 'Rebecca' meets 'Spellbound' without the tension. Fritz Lang's heavy handedness doesn't help, but, at least he cast Joan, who is, as always, a real flesh and blood person, whereas Redgrave seems like he's wandered in from a stage play and isn't quite sure what he's doing there.

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 * * * 'Secret beyond the Door' has a great basic plot and that's not coincidentally because it's a variation on the magnificent 'Bluebeard' tale. Unfortunately, the film is a bit long; it suffers from too many tedious parts and there's little excitement at first. Also, even though she sounds gorgeous, Bennett's voice-over is a bit annoying from time to time. The final half hour is very compelling and loaded with atmosphere and tension. Lang works his way up to a terrific finale but the actual 'secret' is very very disappointing! That's really too bad because the story deserved a more credible climax. That's why I initially mentioned that maybe the secret was better left unrevealed. But enough with the negative aspects! The film, with its stylish photography, is beautiful to look at and the acting is nearly perfect. Joan Bennett gives away a touching performance as the insecure, but devoted Celia. Lang's directing is solid as always and lifts the entire production up to a higher level. I picked up somewhere that Lang himself didn't like how 'Secret beyond the Door' looked. This only shows he was a remarkable director…Even when he doesn't fully support what he's making, he still delivers a quality product.

Fritz Lang directed this story of a young woman (Bennett) engaged to an ordinary, somewhat stuffy, but well-meaning lawyer. Bennett takes a vacation in a studio-bound Mexico where she meets a mysterious stranger (Redgrave) who seems to be able to peel away the hard enamel and expose the somewhat feral contents. Fritz Lang's best work was probably behind him, and Bennett's locutions are a little too British. (Her "pahst" rolls before her eyes as she narrates the story. It's not exactly RP but it's certainly not Yorkshire or New York either.) Michael Redgrave is a convincing actor but not much of a stereotypical man of mystery. His appeal rests partly on his ability to project a light-hearted open quality. Yet, this screenplay is quite well written. When Redgrave first speaks to Bennett he compares her to the weather in the Dakotas, the sunny stillness with the turbulence of a storm still to come, and the first breath of wind bending the wheat, etc. It sounds more perfumed than it is when Redgrave delivers these observations. Disregarding the Harlequin romance inherent in the situation, some effort (and talent) when into this dialog. And listen to some of Bennett's narration. She witnesses a a knife fight between two gypsies over a woman. She doesn't run away. She's enthralled. "I'd seen fights before but this was different. Death was in the air. And I thought of the woman -- how proud she must be." The woman is proud of having two men fight to the death for her. It's far from what you'd expect from a carelessly written character, but Bennett's is not a carelessly written character. Sometimes the narration IS over explicit. At one point, during Redgrave's absence, we see her pacing nervously for about twenty seconds, while the narration tells us, "I walked and I worried. I walked and I worried." Why bring in the backhoe when the garden trowel was doing just fine on its own? After a while the story begins to look like familiar variations on a theme, a kind of pastiche. A bored woman, swept off her feet and married to a man about whom she knows practically nothing, not even that he's been previously married. He takes her home to his mansion where she meets strange characters, mostly distant and unfriendly. She pries but gets little. And Redgrave begins to act queerly, overtaken by arid moods. "Rebecca" is probably the main source. There is even a Mrs. Danvers character whose face is draped with a scarf. Bennett's suspicion grows that Redgrave murdered his first wife. At the same time there is a secret room that he always keeps locked -- until Bennett tries to make a copy of the only key. The scent that hangs in the air is not that of the lilies and lilacs that everyone keeps talking about but L'Eau de Jane Eyre. That reminds me. I was able to grow a sprig of jasmine once. I almost got high when I first sniffed it. It turned all other volatile terpines plebian. It all ends in an explosion of psychobabble. Lang certainly knows how to make good use of mirrors and ominous shadows but overall the movie struck me as rather slow and complicated. It's not far removed from the Lifetime Movie Network.

All the ingredients are there for an engaging story of a brooding widower with a distant young son who marries a lost young woman and brings her home to his house of mystery. In the hands of the usually brilliant Fritz Lang, however, comes a story so unbelievable and pretentious that the results are so melodramatically ridiculousness that sometimes you really don't believe what is transpiring on screen. Like the film version of "Rebecca", this starts with the heroine (Joan Bennett) narrating the beginning of the tale, going into the saga of how she went through losing her older brother and gained a fortune, and ended up falling in love with a brooding man (Michael Redgrave) whom she met on vacation. He forgets to tell her that he is a widower and a father, and that his house is planted with infamous rooms recreated from actual crime scenes. Anne Revere gives a nuanced portrayal of his loving but somewhat overbearing sister (who basically takes care of the young son), while Barbara O'Neil goes down Mrs. Danvers territory as the scarred secretary that was on the verge of being fired before rescuing the son from a fire. Natalie Schafer is amusing as Bennett's best friend ("I'm not as poisonous as I look", she tells Redgrave upon their first meeting) who is part of a tour Redgrave takes some party guests on to view the remakes of the rooms Redgrave collects. She is the first person to point out the mysterious locked door which Redgrave refuses to open, making Bennett mighty suspicious. But curiosity killed the cat and threatens to do in the second wife, leading to a melodramatic conclusion that seems totally ripped off from "Rebecca". Even Joan Bennett admitted this film was a fiasco, her over-acting here sometimes out of tune with her usually excellent performances. Redgrave as the brooding hero actually tones down his performance, giving what mystery there is there some interest. It's just too bad that the results are so ridiculously silly, since the film is beautifully photographed and almost Gothic in nature. While the acting certainly could have been better, the fault for what results lies in the hand of director Lang who seemed to be going for a sense of romance, mystery and film noir which never gels.

Fritz Lang's Secret Beyond the Door... (1948) is a movie with a Freudian plot.Celia (Joan Bennett), a pretty New Yorker is about to marry a man she doesn't love.In a trip to Mexico she meets an interesting man named Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave).She marries him instead and soon discovers some alarming details about the man.His mansion is filled with rooms where famous murders took place.One of those rooms is always locked, and Celia must find out what is behind that door.This is a fascinating movie that has been done in a Film-Noir style.Joan Bennett is a perfect lady in the lead.Redgrave's performance as the troubled man is excellent.There are also talents such as Anne Revere, Barbara O'Neil, Natalie Schafer and Anabel Shaw.This is a fine movie for the old movie lovers, whether or not you're into psychology.It's a thrilling tale that will keep you nailed to your seats.And the plot thickens in the end.

Seeking adventure from her dull but comfortable life Celia Lampshire played by Joan Benett makes a trip to Mexico, it is there she meets chillingly cold dumb dull boring completely charmless arrogant obnoxious and unpleasant Mark Lamphere played by Michael Redgrave. For some reason these two hit it off, the chemistry between them is amazing but in the negative, if Lauren Bacall and Bogart were like introducing Nitro to Glycerin, then these two are like introducing Liquid to Nitrogen. The musical direction is on a complete physco trip, in one scene Marks Sister is talking calmly and smiling to Celia next to her dressing table but the music is almost exploding (and awful). The story is completely uninspired and simply too obvious to be entertaining it plods along wasting your time, but you will not care what happens either to him or her, or indeed why he is the self obsessed plonker that he is.