Secret Beyond the Door

Secret Beyond the Door is a 1947 American film noir psychological thriller and a modern updating of the Bluebeard fairytale, directed by Fritz Lang, produced by Lang's Diana Productions, and released by Universal Pictures. The film stars Joan Bennett and was produced by her husband Walter Wanger. The black-and-white film noir drama is about a woman who suspects her new husband, an architect, plans to kill her.

Secret Beyond the Door
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Fritz Lang
Screenplay by	Silvia Richards
Story by	Rufus King
Produced by	Fritz Lang
Starring	Joan Bennett Michael Redgrave
Cinematography	Stanley Cortez
Edited by	Arthur Hilton
Music by	Miklós Rózsa
Production companies	Walter Wanger Productions Diana Production Company
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release date	December 24, 1947 (1947-12-24)
Running time	99 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$1.5 million[1] or $615,065[2] or $1.8 million[3]
Box office	$700,000[3]

Plot

On her wedding day, rich heiress Celia refuses all proposals in New York, goes to Mexico for a vacation, and falls in love with architect Mark Lamphere. They have a happy honeymoon until she playfully locks him out of their hotel room. He then turns cold toward her, and eventually returns to his New England home for what he says is business.

Celia follows him, and upon reaching the mansion which he designed and built, she discovers that he is actually a widower with a son. The boy, David, is being looked after by Mark's sister Caroline and his secretary, Miss Robey, whose face was scarred saving David's life in a fire. She wears a scarf to conceal the disfigurement. Celia makes friends with David, but is uneasy about Mark's mood swings. Caroline hints that Mark is somewhat responsible for his first wife Eleanor's death. Caroline also mentions having to lock Mark in his room when he was a boy. Mark later displays to their party guests the suite of special rooms he built on a special gated corridor in the mansion. Each of the first six rooms is an exact reproduction of a famous murder scene; a seventh room is locked and Mark refuses to show it.

Celia, wondering if that room shows the scene of Mark's murder of Eleanor, cuts down one of their bedroom candles to soften the wax and make an impression of the room's key. While doing this, she catches Miss Robey without her scarf, and learns that she had plastic surgery. She was pretending to be still disfigured to keep Mark and Caroline's gratitude for saving David and avoid being fired. She was hoping to marry Mark herself until Celia turned up. Celia promises not to tell on her.

Mark is disturbed at the unequal height of the two candles in the bedroom. Celia receives the copy of the key she made, enters the seventh room, which is an exact duplicate of her and Mark's bedroom. She concludes that it does commemorate Eleanor's death until Celia 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 but his future murder of Celia, who flees.

It is revealed that Mark has a strong compulsion to kill Celia despite loving her. He left her in Mexico to save her, but now the urge is back and Mark must leave again.

Celia returns because she loves Mark, who is alarmed, as it means that they will be alone in the house together. Mark tries to leave to save her life, but his compulsion overcomes him and he returns. He finds Celia waiting for him in the seventh room. Celia says that she is there because she would rather die than live without him. Channeling the psychological theories advanced about murderers at the party, she begs him to remember what happened in his childhood to make him this way. And he does. When Mark was ten, his mother promised to read to him before she left to go dancing, but he found himself locked in his room as she departed. His pounding and screaming were in vain, and his love for his mother was transmuted into hate, which was transferred to Celia when she locked the door of their honeymoon room. He attempts to strangle her with a scarf before Celia reveals that it was Caroline, not their mother, who locked him in; he accepts this, and the scarf falls from his hand. They then notice smoke and fire; Miss Robey, thinking that Celia is in the room alone and wanting to continue as the dominant woman in Mark's life, locked the door and set fire to the house. Mark kicks the door open, escapes the house, and returns for Celia when she collapses.

Mark later says that Celia killed the root of evil in him that night, but he has a long way to go. She tells him they will go that way together.

Cast

• Joan Bennett as Celia Lamphere
• Michael Redgrave as Mark Lamphere
• Anne Revere as Caroline Lamphere
• Barbara O'Neil as Miss Robey
• Natalie Schafer as Edith Potter
• Paul Cavanagh as Rick Barrett
• Anabel Shaw as Intellectual Sub-Deb
• Rosa Rey as Paquita
• James Seay as Bob Dwight
• Mark Dennis as David Lamphere

Release

The film recorded a loss of $1,145,000.^[1]

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

When the film was first released, film critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times was of mixed opinions: "If you want to be tough about it—okay, it's a pretty silly yarn and it is played in a manner no less fatuous by the sundry members of the cast. But Mr. Lang is still a director who knows how to turn the obvious, such as locked doors and silent chambers and roving spotlights, into strangely tingling stuff. And that's why, for all its psycho-nonsense, this film has some mildly creepy spots and some occasional faint resemblance to Rebecca which it was obviously aimed to imitate."^[6] Variety called it arty and almost surrealistic. The motivations of the characters were described as occasionally murky.^[7]

New York's PM was highly critical in 1948: "what they [Wanger, Lang, Bennett and Redgrave] have come up with is an utterly synthetic 'psychological' suspense incredibility wrapped in a gravity so pretentious it is to laugh, wherein all the actors stalk and stare like zombies while the sound track babbles fancy words."^[8]

Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader called the film's murkiness a strength.^[9] Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 54% of 13 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 5.5/10.^[10]