|
|
"Secret Beyond the Door..." (1949) is a film noir from the master of the genre, Fritz Lang. It stars Joan Bennett and Michael Redgrave in a Freudian tale of strange, twisted neurosis that was made in the wake of Alfred Hitchcock's ostensibly similar take on psychoanalysis, "Spellbound" (1945).
The screenplay, by Silvia Richards from Rufus King's short story, is almost another version of the "Bluebeard" fairy tale as well as borrowing odds and ends from Hitchcock's "Rebecca" (1940): the wild and impulsive Celia (Bennett) marries the architect Mark Lamphere (Redgrave), and while on their honeymoon, she realises her new husband has many secrets, such as having had a previous wife, and more intriguingly, a strange hobby of building and replicating rooms where murders have been committed. Yet one room remains locked; driven by curiosity and a growing fear for her own life, she seeks to find the "Secret Beyond the Door
" It is hardly original, stealing mainly from Hitchcock's aforementioned films (even the paintings behind the credits are reminiscent of Salvador Dalí) as well as "Suspicion" (1941) and a whole host of "wife in danger" movies, so popular in the thirties and forties. However, Fritz Lang's immaculate direction lifts this, if not quite into that elite stable of movies that comprise his best American work, then it is still top stuff, stunningly shot by the legendary Stanley Cortez (he was the cinematographer for both Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" [1942] and Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter" [1955]), giving it a real noir ambiance and excellently acted, the performers all being attuned to Lang's bleak vision of life, the obligatory happy ending notwithstanding, demanded by the studio, RKO.
While the psychology is pat and the story is unoriginal, it's treatment is superlative. For fans of noir and of great films, this is a must-see.
score 8/10
JohnWelles 10 April 2012
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2594652/ |
|
1-3-2021 00:06:13