Potently invoking Hitchcock’s REBECCA (1940) and SUSPICION (1941), Fritz Lang’s SECRET BEHIND THE DOOR... shrouds a well-to-do heiress under the unrelieved dread that her husband has an ulterior motive to snuff her (only this time, monetary concern is not a major impetus).
After the death of her brother Rick Barrett (Cavanagh), who bequeaths her a large sum of fortune, Celia (Bennett) is stuck by a coup de foudre while peregrinating in Mexico before her intending marriage with the straight-and-arrow lawyer Bob Dwight (Seay). Told through her voice in her head (a ploy Lang utilizes efficiently to propel the narrative momentum and spell out her inner thoughts), it is interesting to see under what circumstances her eyes meet his for the first time, their attraction shimmers with danger from the very start, ensorcelled by the mystique of Mark Lamphere (Redgrave), the pair hastens to the altar in situ, and Celia becomes Ms. Lamphere, but to her, Mark, the architect is a total stranger, she feels that she has a life-time ahead to get to know a man she truly loves, but even before they set their feet back on the US soil, Mark’s labile behavior during their honeymoon pours cold water on Celia’s marital anticipation and after the initial disquietude, she is bent on finding out the psychological reason behind that, even it means to put herself squarely in the harm’s way.
More and more secrets emerge when Celia moves into Mark’s domicile, his previous marriage which leaves him a son David (Dennis), his spinster sister Caroline (Revere), and a (presumably) disfigured secretary Miss Robey (O’Neil), plus the smothering atmosphere and rumors about his mother and first wife, both pushing up daisies now. Mark is in evidence, under a plethora of petticoat sway, especially the hand that rocks the cradle, which might be significantly accountable for his none-too-sane mindset.
But the most startling revelation is that Mark has a macabre hobby of collecting and recreating “murder rooms”, a quixotical idea but is effectuated with almost risible formality by everybody acting dead serious about it, as if it is a workaday thing. Celia is further intrigued by the seventh room, which Mark claims it is finished but allows no one to see. The secret behind that closed door will confirm Celia’s mortal fear (with Miklós Rózsa’s thrilling, sonorous accompaniment in its crescendo), but also emboldens her to put on the caper of an amateur headshrinker and finally disinter Mark’s psychopathic roots (lilacs and closed doors are two key clues) once and for all, Lang might take liberty with the high concept of psychoanalysis, but as a cinematic mystery, he holds fast to an arresting, alluring tale (starkly Gothic set design and expressive shadow and mist play are right up Fang’s alley) that the couple needs to rescue each other (one mentally and another physically) before forming a salutatory union, in another word, a happy-ever-after trite.
Joan Bennett’s star glamor aside, she really strengthens her spine to telegraph a gritty facade that befits a heroine who will sillily go out on a limb and ready to die for the man she loves, and Michael Redgrave’s suave persona is intermittently disrupted by the demon sizzling under the skin and makes a persuasive plea in his self-trial figment. Both Anne Revere and Barbara O’Neil leave strong impressions playing the friend-or-foe cards with a beguiling ghost of ambiguity. In the event, SECRET BEHIND THE DOOR... is an above-average entry among Lang’s oeuvre, an edge-of-the-seat, albeit derivative startler submersed in his expressionistic conceit and intoxicating syntax.
referential entries: Alfred Hitchcock’s REBECCA (1940, 8.3/10), SUSPICION (1941, 7.6/10); Lang’s MINISTRY OF FEAR (1944, 6.4/10), THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944, 7.5/10).
HD
