Secret Beyond the Door

Expressionist and noir master Fritz Lang (M, Metropolis, The Big Heat) directs this unusual Freudian thriller starring Joan Bennett (lead of Lang’s noir classics Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street) and showcasing superb cinematography by Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons, The Night of the Hunter). “Like many popular Hollywood women’s melodramas, Secret Beyond the Door begins with a plot twist: a young woman (Bennett) marries a man she barely knows and soon feels he is threatening her life or trying to drive her insane. Lang acknowledged that Hitchcock’s Rebecca was an inspiration; Gothic themes of madness mixed with Freudian psychoanalysis were particularly in vogue in films of the late 1940s. The story – in which Bennett’s husband Michael Redgrave believes that rooms have the power to cause violence, even murder – affords Lang the opportunity to indulge in the kind of Expressionist shadowscapes he had been famous for in Germany in the 1920s, as well as his longstanding interest in architecture and its metaphoric connotations. Ultimately, the film is less about psychoanalysis than about Cortez’s beautifully photographed pastiche of Gothic and Expressionist imagery” (Jan-Christopher Horak). Preservation funded by The Film Foundation.