Secret Beyond the Door (1947)

Film: Secret Beyond the Door (1947)

Stars: Joan Bennett, Michael Redgrave, Anne Revere, Barbar O'Neil, Natalie Schafer

Director: Fritz Lang

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

Joan Bennett & Fritz Lang starred together in four films that they were both credited on (Lang reportedly also helped on Bennett's 1941 war film Confirm or Deny).  Three of these films were film noir, while a fourth (Man Hunt) apparently is not technically noir but has lots of noir-like tendencies.  We have reviewed two of these films before on this blog (click The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street below), but we had not gotten to the third, so this year where we're doing some cleanup and seeing some blind spots in key filmographies it made total sense for us to move into the last movie that Bennett & Lang made together, 1947's Secret Beyond the Door.  Given that I loved both of their other movies together for this series, the expectations were high...and not really met.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Celia (Bennett), a beautiful & wealthy woman on vacation, and in need of a new husband.  Though she has more appropriate choices pursuing her, she settles for the enigmatic Mark Lamphere, and they wed after knowing each other for a short time.  The two move to his estate, and there she finds out that she's Mark's second husband...and that he comes with a creepy child from her first marriage.  She also befriends Mark's more gregarious sister Caroline (Revere) and his odd assistant Miss Robey (O'Neil).  Mark's house is unusual, as it holds six rooms, all of which depict a different famous murder scene, and it has a seventh, locked room that Celia cannot see.  Initially, she starts to believe it to be a scene from his first marriage, a sort of confession that he killed his first wife (a belief shared by his son), but when she opens it, she realizes it's a recreation of her bedroom, and the candles are uneven just like in her room...the room depicts that he wants to kill her, not his ex-wife.

We're going to take an unusual step here and stop mid-summary because I need to acknowledge-this is an AMAZING idea for a movie if they had pursued it.  The film until this point is a bit dry, and there's a lot of intrigue around that seventh room, to the point where I figured there was no way that they could live up to the hype.  In that moment, though, I was genuinely floored-it hadn't occurred to me that they were recreating a murder that hadn't happened yet, and man did I wish that they had stuck with that premise, which they actually do for a little bit afterward.  We see that Mark did want to kill her, living out a childhood trauma of him being locked in a room for hours (which he blamed on his mother, even though it had just been done as a prank by his sister), but he can't go through with it because he loves her.

The film ends with him getting better, his childhood traumas cured, and Miss Robey burning down the house ala Mrs. Danvers, obsessed with her employer that she will never possess romantically.  None of this works-it's too placid, too dull, and makes you care about a romantic relationship that doesn't work (Redgrave & Bennett do not have good chemistry).  But for a brief moment about an hour into the picture, you think that Lang has created an under-appreciated classic, either with her fleeing her own, planned murder (which she's walked right into) or Mark actually confessing to his "ultimate" crime creation...changing the ending here, this film is the rare movie I'd actively love to see remade.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai