Secret Beyond the Door [Remastered Special Edition] [DVD]

Product Information

Antagonistic Offspring: Mark's son, David. Not to Celia (as one would normally expect), but to Mark. Vern follows Scooter on the streets and finds him entering a diner. There, he meets Dee, who gets suspicious of him. Bertram and Maisie gets drunk and sing along to each other. Upon arriving to Maisie's place, she invites him over but he rejects her offer. The next day, Alma goes shopping to buy a new dress for the party. She founds a dress she likes but is more expensive. Unable to afford the dress, she decides to recreate the dress with her own sewing materials. At the Castillo's, Rita and Carlo are having dinner but Carlo drinks instead rather than eating. He reveals that he suspects that Rita is cheating on him but she denies it. He insults her by reminding her that he once paid her. Rita gets mad and decides to cut off his drink but he threatens her about her lover. As they go to sleep, she calls Scooter and tells him that there has been a change of plans.

She suggested that everything after Joan Bennett screams when she sees a man in the mist is Redgrave's dream, hallucination, or justification. If you recall, the next scene after the scream is where Redgrave puts himself on trial. JF proposed that the rest of the film is how Redgrave would like things to have been, instead of the reality of his having killed Joan after she screamed. Mark is disturbed at the unequal height of the two candles in the bedroom. Celia receives the copy of the key she had made to the seventh room, enters it and recognizes it as an exact duplicate of her and Mark’s bedroom. She concludes that it does indeed commemorate the death of Eleanor until she notices that the dresser candles are uneven in the same way they are in the real bedroom now. The room is to display not Mark’s past murder of Eleanor but his future murder of her. She runs away. Secret Beyond the Door is a 1948 Film Noir thriller directed by Fritz Lang, starring Joan Bennett and Michael Redgrave. 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. The 1940s kept all of its nastiest secrets in noir, and that’s what makes watching film noir so rewarding. It’s the history lessons.

Rufus King's novel Museum Piece No. Thirteen, upon which the film was based, also appeared in the Dec 1945 issue of Red Book magazine under the title The Secret Beyond the Door. The film opens with a voice-over narration spoken by Joan Bennett. Contemporary sources indicate that British actor Michael Redgrave made his U.S. film debut in the picture, although RKO's production of Mourning Becomes Electra (see above), which Redgrave filmed immediately afterward, was released just prior to Secret Beyond the Door. According to contemporary sources, director Fritz Lang wanted Milton Krasner as director of photography, but Bennett, a partner with Lang and producer Walter Wanger in Diana Productions, insisted that Stanley Cortez be used. Contemporary sources reveal Lang's first choice for Mark Lamphere was James Mason. In addition, modern sources note that Ring Larder, Jr. was initially considered as the film's screenwriter and that the final script, by Silvia Richards and Lang (uncredited), took nearly a year to complete. As a result the cast have to thanklessly play it up the best they can. I thought than Bennett did as good a job as she could have hoped to have done. She isn't brilliant though but she plays detective well. More important but not much cop is Redgrave; OK the blame lies more on the material than in his performance but given how little was conveyed by words at times, his performance was important but not up to the task. What makes Secret Beyond the Door... fascinating is Lang's excellent direction of individual scenes, and the strikingly beautiful cinematography of Stanley Cortez, that finds all manner of strange shadow patterns in both the Mexican honeymoon getaway and Mark Lamphere's House of Usher Felicitous Rooms. Secret Beyond the Door was released in the UK on DVD in November 2011 by Exposure Cinema. [4] Olive Films released the film in the United States on DVD and Blu-ray on September 4, 2012. [5] Reception [ edit ]

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. This recap of Why Women Kill season 2, episode 1, “Secret Beyond the Door”, and Why Women Kill season 2, episode 2, “The Woman in the Window”, contains spoilers. Pet the Dog: A literal example. One of the reasons Celia can't give up entirely on Mark is that she sees him bring home a hurt dog and bandage his leg.I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one, because I'm a fan of Fritz Lang and Joan Bennett. She meets there three people whose existence she had not suspected: her husband's sister, who has been running things and wants to carry on (does anyone remember Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers in 'Rebecca'?); his secretary, who had hoped to marry him, and always wears a scarf round her face to hide scars from a fire; and his rather hostile son, who had no more been mentioned than the fact of a previous marriage… Her worries are temporarily alleviated when Mark invites her to join him at the Lamphere family home, but his inexplicable mood swings continue and make her unsure of whether she has married wisely. To add to her concerns, Celia finds out that Mark already has a son from a previous marriage, that the last wife died under Mark's care, and that people suspect Mark of marrying Celia to bail him out of his precarious financial position. I think the best character in this film was definitely Joan Bennett. I liked the idea that she would basically be turned on by Michael Redgrave and the other man fighting, and she seemed even more turned on when the thrown knife narrowly missed stabbing her hand. I wish that her motivation for marrying Redgrave would have been made a little more clearer, or if we'd seen more scenes of him romancing her or something. While it most definitely was an impetuous decision on their parts, it comes across as a very naive decision as well. I am okay with the whirlwind romance, but I think there needed to be more exposition. I liked her scenes at the end. Though much like other 1940s films that depict psychology, it seems that Michael Redgrave's therapy session (so to speak) and Joan's assessment of his condition seemed a bit rushed and too pat. This is a man who builds replicas of rooms where famous murders took place and we're supposed to believe that his whole issue boils down to being constantly dominated by women? Now he's cured and they'll live happily ever after?

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! Admittedly, the denouement is still a bit hard to take - just how nuts is Redgrave, does he really mean to kill B and if so why? Miss B is given the lion's share of the camera with flattering costumes and even an off-screen commentary (the sudden switch at the climax to an off-camera commentary by Redgrave is another element that doesn't work) but she is no Joan Fontaine.

Out There

When Mark does show up he exhibits an entirely different personality, acting alternately nervous and angry. An elaborate open house initially breaks the mood until Mark decides to show his guests his personally designed "felicitous rooms". Celia has heard of these and expects them to be happy places. They are instead elaborate shrines to notorious murder scenes through history, a macabre gallery of horrors. If that's not enough, the Levender Falls house has a room #7 that nobody is allowed to enter. Now half convinced that she has married a madman, Celia determines to discover for herself the secret beyond the door. Art Shift: Mark's Inner Monologue about his guilt is filmed as a courtroom scene in which Mark acts as both prosecutor and defendant in front of a faceless judge and jury. Another take on the BLUEBEARD/REBECCA type storyline from German auteur Fritz Lang, although I have to say that this is one of his worst movies. The story involves an idealistic young bride who marries a handsome man and moves into his ancestral home only to discover that he's hiding some very dark secrets. Who is the mysterious scarred woman in his home, and what secret is lurking behind door number seven? 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.