Secret Beyond the Door
1948 Directed by Fritz Lang, William Holland
Synopsis
Fritz Lang’s psycho thriller tells the story of a woman who marries a stranger with a deadly hobby and through their love he attempts to fight off his obsessive-compulsive actions.
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ROOMS KILL PEOPLE.
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Lang puts on the style and delivers crisp B/W cinematography with fantastic lighting and well staged camera movement. However, the movie can only deliver fully on this surface level, the script is clunky and the plot too predictable to be truly engrossing, which leaves us with a flawed, but nice to look at and very entertaining retelling of the Bluebeard tale.
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Has its moments of style and performances are good, but there are better films of this kind.
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the ending sells it all short. i'm sensing some code intervention here. still, it's one to behold.
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For 2/3rd of the run time, it's a great Hitchcockian mystery about a woman that marries a man with (literally) rooms full of secrets. Then, all of the sudden, the story hits the wall. What follows is constant confusion and weak psychoanalysis. A total missed opportunity.
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When Fritz went Hollywood. Awful and melodramatic.
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The opening sequence of Secret Beyond the Door immediately reminded me of one of the most beautiful images that I've seen in cinema: a boat travelling downstream beneath the starry night sky in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter. I then knew it was the work of cinematographer Stanley Cortez and realized I was in for something special.
The story begins with Celia (Joan Bennett) on her wedding night, recounting in her mind the events that led up to that day. The film has a beautiful oneiric quality to it during this time, the expressionistic cinematography, Bennett's whispery voice-over, and fairy-tale allusions in an alluring flashback, all combine to set up the film perfectly. After these opening fifteen minutes…
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Immediate Rebecca vibe. Honeymoon top, my oh my. Cortez putting on a hell of a show. Never-ceasing interior monologue; murmuring mind. Faces that surround concrete rather than in the mind. Instant sisters. Jury of faceless peers. Transference of perspective.
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A good slow burning thriller with some unexpected twists and turns, but not the likes of which one would come to expect from Fritz Lang.
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Not Fritz Lang's best, but even subpar Lang still has plenty to make it Recommended. Secret Beyond the Door is a pretty blatant Rebecca rip-off, but Lang's version has a salacious preoccupation with murder and is full of amusing psychoanalytic explanations for the same. Stars Joan Bennett and Michael Redgrave are pretty stiff, and the romance never quite blossoms, but there is decent suspense to be had in the movie's middle, with the moody photography giving this tale of doomed love and unhealthy family ties its essential spook factor.
My full review at DVD Talk: www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/56568/secret-beyond-the-door/
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En psykologisk ”freudiansk” versjon av det klassiske Blåskjegg eventyret. En nysgjerrig kvinne åpner en dør hun ikke får lov til å åpne for å oppdage en grusom hemmelighet.
Ei ung dame reiser til Mexico på ferie før hun gifter seg med en gammel venn, som hun anser på som et trygt valg som ektemann. Men, der finner hun drømmemannen – En attraktiv og mystisk fremmed som oppdager henne gjennom folkemengden. Etter bare noen få dager gifter de seg, og flytter inn i hans store villa, hvor han har en egen avdeling med rom som er inspirert etter berømte drap. Hun oppdager en haug hemmeligheter om huset og hennes ektemann, men det hun virkelig lurer på er hva som skjuler seg…