Fritz Lang does Rebecca

Some months back, TCM ran a movie that sounded interesting to me, so once again I recorded it in order to be able to watch it later and do a review on it. This time, the movie in question is Secret Beyond the Door. Having watched it, it is now time to do the review of the movie.

Celia (Joan Bennett) starts off with a bizarre prologue about certain dreams, before telling us that doesn't matter because it's her wedding day! She's in Mexico, where she's met Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave). She went to Mexico after the death of her brother, and wound up with a trust fund that her lawyer set up. He's not just the family lawyer, he's a good friend who is willing to marry her. But as we see she winds up marrying this mysterious Mark.

The honeymoon seems to go well, until she locks the door of her suite as a bit of a joke to make him jealous. Mark responds by saying that he has to go back to New York immediately. He's been publishing a money-losing magazine, and supposedly a company in New York wants to buy it. He's also abruptly emotionally cold to Celia, telling her that she shouldn't follow him to New York, but instead should go straight to the Lamphere family home outside of the city. And then the maid tells her Mark was lying about getting a telegram. Nice way to start a marrige.

And then Celia gets to her new home, and finds that there's a lot more going on. Mark is an architect, which is no big deal, but the much bigger deal is that he's a widower, with a teenaged kid that Mark never told Celia about. Also living at the house are some servants, Mark's sister Caroline (Anne Revere), and a personal assistant, Robey (Barbara O'Neil). Robey jealously guards Mark's office, and wears scarves because she got burned saving David from a fire some time back.

If the secrets we've already found out that Mark kept from Celia aren't enough, we're going to find there's a lot more. When Mark holds a house party, he decides to show off his hobby, which is designing spare rooms that are replicas of rooms where famous murders happened! Boy is that odd, and it unsurprisingly puts Celia off a bit. She's even more put off when there's one room that's locked. That must be the room where Mark keeps the uranium sands from the Ai Moraes mountains... oh wait, that's a different Alfred Hitchcock movie, and Celia is only the second Mrs. De Winter, not a spy and daughter of a Nazi.

But as you can guess, Celia is exceedingly curious about what's behind that last door. She's also beginning to get the impression that there's something Mark hasn't been telling her about the death of his first wife. All of this gets Celia to start wondering whether he might have killed his first wife -- and whether he might be harboring thoughts of killing her, too!

Secret Beyond the Door is a movie that has some obvious parallels to some Alfred Hitchcock movies, but was directed by Fritz Lang. Unsurprisingly with such a director, the film is technically quite competent, with a lot of interesting visual touches. However, I can't help but think that Lang could have picked a better script to which to apply all those touches. The plot is enough of a mess that I almost found myself wondering whether the film was about to break out into parody. But it never stops taking itself seriously.

Not that Secret Beyond the Door is a bad movie; it's more that if I'd recommend movies from any of the main people involved, this isn't the first one I'd pick. It's still worth one watch, however.