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. 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. 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.

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. After a whirlwind romance, Celia Barrett (Bennett) marries Mark Lamphere (Redgrave) but finds once the honeymoon is over his behaviour becomes quite odd... For that matter, the trappings of Mark's mysterious home are a catalogue of clichés about women feeling estranged in a new marriage to a Byronic husband. The story even makes use of a big fire for its conclusion, while every character reveals more secrets hidden from poor uninformed Celia.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.

The narrator introduces a woman named Alma Fillcot, a housewife with dreams of becoming a member of the exclusive Elysian Park Garden Club. 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.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. Draped in Gothic overtones and astonishingly beautiful into the bargain, it's unmistakably a Lang film. His ire towards the cast and studio, where he was usurped in the cutting room and with choice of cinematographer, led Lang to be very dismissive towards the piece. However, it contains all that's good about the great director. Scenes such as the opening involving a paper boat on ripples of water, or a sequence that sees Mark dream he is in a courtroom full of faceless jurors, these are indelible images. Then there's the lighting techniques used around the moody Lamphere mansion that are simply stunning, with Cortez (The Night of the Hunter) photographing with atmospheric clarity. 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.