It's been a little while since I've blogged about a silent movie, so I recently sat down to watch Behind the Door and do a post on it here.
The movie was released in 1919, but is set in 1925. Oscar Krug (Hobart Bosworth) returns to his home town in Maine, where he used to run a taxidermy shop, and stops off at the grave of an old friend, who is the only person who could possibly understand the sorrow that Krug feels. There's a reason for that sorrow and guilt, and we're going to learn about it in flashback....
Go back to 1917, when Krug was a respected member of town society, running that taxidermy shop and in love with Alice Morse (Jane Novak). But then a funny thing happens. The US declares war against Germany, entering the Great War, which is of course not yet World War I since the movie was released well before the outbreak of World War II. Krug, despite having been considered quite respectable, is also German-American, and as we saw in Ever in My Heart, there was a substantial amount of hatred towards German-Americans in 1917.
It's so bad that Alice's father, the local bank manager, decides Alice is not to see Oscar any more, even though she's an adult, and tries to get her to marry his business partner. Krug decides that the best thing he can do is show that he's even more patriotic than the rest of the people in town, and enlist so that he can go fight the Germans. He winds up in the navy.
Somehow, as his ship pulls out, who should show up but Alice! She and Oscar have already gotten married secretly, but when she comes to see the ship off, she stays on board beyond the "all ashore who are going ashore" speech, being hidden by a navy nurse who apparently knows the score. Alice gets to keep seeing Oscar, and they all live happily ever after.
Oh hell no, that's not what happens. The ship they're on gets torpedoed by a German submarine, and Krug is left to drift by the nasty German commander, Lt. Brandt (a young Wallace Beery). Brandt is so nasty that he takes Alice as the spoils from having torpedoed the ship!
Some time later, Krug is on another ship, and this time they get to bomb a German sub out of the water. As you can probably guess, this one is commanded by Brandt, and the ship takes Brandt on board as a prisoner. Brandt doesn't recognize Krug, and on learning that Krug speaks German, thinks Krug might be more sympathetic, so he tells about the American ship he sank and what he and the crew did to the woman they took hostage. Now that Krug knows what happened to his wife, he has the chance to extract some revenge.....
Behind the Door is a surprisingly brutal movie for 1919, with Bosworth doing quite well in his role. Beery's is more of a supporting role even though he of course would go on to become the better known actor. The movie languished for years; some footage is believed lost permanently, or at least, they haven't found it yet. The most complete known print was found in an archive in Russia, and combined with a script, there was a collaborative effort to restore the movie, with intertitled production stills filling out the lost portions. So, in that regard, it doesn't look anywhere near as intrusive as the four-hour reconstruction of Greed.
The restoration of Behind the Door has received a pricey DVD release. Because of the lack of prints out in the wide world, there doesn't seem to be anything on Youtube despite the fact that anything before the restoration would be in the public domain. (The added intertitles are all labeled "2016" and there's a new music score.)
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