Secret Beyond the Door

Michael Redgrave and Joan Bennett

Fritz Lang's Secret Beyond the Door, from 1947, is the last and least of Lang's collaborations with Joan Bennett and her husband, producer Walter Wanger. At the time, the film was a commercial and critical disaster, but its critical defenders were one day to include Tom Milne, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Fernando C. Croce. Lang wrangled not only with Bennett during the course of the shoot, but also with distinguished cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Andersons, The Night of the Hunter, Shock Corridor).Despite these travails, the film looks pretty rich. Lang could conjure a cinematic nightmare even with the leftover sets on the Universal lot. Natalie Schafer (Lovey on Gilligan's Island) provides adept and welcome comic relief while Ann Revere is always a sturdy presence even if she is underused here. The theme of homicidal compulsion should be right up Lang's alley, but there is a large impediment and that would be the script. 

If Citizen Kane is, as Orson Welles put it, dime book Freud than Secret Behind the Door is comic book Freud. Now I am married to a psychiatrist and am favorably inclined to the father of psychoanalysis, but the script is so baldly and self-trumpetingly Freudian that the end effect is ridiculous. Architect Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave) is so hung up on his Oedipal issues that lady love Celia (Miss Bennett) has to bring his repressed trauma, the secret behind the door, to light in the final reel in order to cure her man. The film was made at the height of Hollywood's fascination with psychoanalysis in films such as Lady in the Dark and Spellbound. The film's reliance on Freud would not have been fatal to this project if the screenplay had a sound structure. Unfortunately, the screenplay, concocted by Silvia Richards from Rufus King's novel Museum Piece No 13, is a slipshod affair overly beholden to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. We have a widower who lives in a spooky mansion where his first wife died a mysterious death. We also have an embittered member of the household staff who, in a fit of jealous fury, endeavors to torch the mansion at the film's end.

Amidst this leftover hash, there is little Bennett can do to make her character believable. The script is overly reliant on her voiceovers. Bennett looks alternately glazed over or beset with indigestion while her offscreen voice narrates her character's tale of woe. Michael Redgrave's performance is even more problematic. Redgrave's success in Dead of Night briefly gave him leading man status, but here he is so one dimensionally creepy it is hard to see what Celia sees in him. The role required the broodingly Romantic fatalism Olivier carries off in Rebecca. The score is by Miklos Rozsa who is at his string pounding worst.

If you are a card carrying auteurist like me, Fritz Lang's name on the credits of Secret Beyond the Door will be sufficient to pique your interest. Indeed, Lang's eye almost redeems the second hand nature of the screenplay. Almost.