Secret Beyond the Door

Celia is a wealthy woman who marries Mark within weeks of meeting him in Mexico. He is an architect with a strange interest: he buys rooms in which murders were committed and rebuilds them exactly in his house. There is a collection. All the rooms can be visited; one cannot. Mark gives the key to nobody. Celia wants to know what is inside. Fritz Lang directs. Joan Bennett plays Celia and Michael Redgrave plays Mark. The template is the Bluebeard tale and the gothic melodrama common in forties Hollywood; many were made after Rebecca and this is the most extreme of them. The method is interior monologue. Celia's thoughts are heard throughout and the events are given entirely through her perception, which keeps the audience from knowing what is real. The Freudian explanation is both the idea and the problem. The narrative explains everything at the end through a childhood trauma, a resolution belonging to the fashion of its period and too flat from here. Stanley Cortez is the cinematographer; the interiors, the fog and the dark corridors are the strongest element. It failed commercially and came at a difficult point in Lang's American career. Who it is for: viewers who like Fritz Lang and the gothic melodrama of the forties. Who it is not for: the plot is illogical, the resolution comes too easily, and the woman's decisions are not convincing.