Verdict
Summary
From Fritz Lang, Secret Beyond the Door is a noir-drama potboiler with a slow build that eventually reveals itself to be a cautionary tale for women who fall for men they don’t really know, and as such a film, it works mainly because star Bennett really sells the plot with her intense acting in it.
Plot:
A woman marries a man she hardly knows … and discovers that he has some very dark secrets.
Review:
After becoming a widow, Celia (Joan Bennett) has options, including a marriage proposal from a man she respects and can grow to love, but he encourages her to take one last vacation with a friend to Mexico as her “final fling” before committing to marriage again. While there she is swept off her feet by a handsome and mysterious stranger, a businessman with some wealth named Mark (Michael Redgrave) whose quiet intensity is a huge turn on for her. Within just a few days, she has agreed to marry Mark, and when he takes her to live at his huge home, she is shocked to find that he’s been married before and even has a teenaged son. Dismayed to realize that Mark will be gone most of the time on business trips, Celia has a lot of time on her hands to wonder just what kind of man her new husband is. A live-in housekeeper has some strange behavioral issues, and there’s a locked room downstairs that Mark has made explicitly clear he wants to remain shut, and of course this causes Celia to hatch a scheme to try to unlock that door, which involves some deception and lies on her part. But who is the real deceiver? Mark, we know, has been lying to Celia since the beginning, and he might very well have murdered his previous wife, and now that Celia is on to him, her life might very well hang in the balance as she has a startling realization that Mark has past trauma that turns him into a killer …
From Fritz Lang, Secret Beyond the Door is a noir-drama potboiler with a slow build that eventually reveals itself to be a cautionary tale for women who fall for men they don’t really know, and as such a film, it works mainly because star Bennett really sells the plot with her intense acting in it. It’s not exactly what I’d call a “classic” despite its vintage, but it’s a solid enough mystery that has an ending that some might consider satisfying, while I found it to be a little baffling, considering its implications.
Kino Lorber brings this one to Blu-ray in a new (2022) HD master, and the disc comes with an audio commentary by a film historian. This edition comes with a slipcover.
