As a result the cast have to thanklessly play it up the best they can. I thought than Bennett did as good a job as she could have hoped to have done. She isn't brilliant though but she plays detective well. More important but not much cop is Redgrave; OK the blame lies more on the material than in his performance but given how little was conveyed by words at times, his performance was important but not up to the task.

When Mark does show up he exhibits an entirely different personality, acting alternately nervous and angry. An elaborate open house initially breaks the mood until Mark decides to show his guests his personally designed "felicitous rooms". Celia has heard of these and expects them to be happy places. They are instead elaborate shrines to notorious murder scenes through history, a macabre gallery of horrors. If that's not enough, the Levender Falls house has a room #7 that nobody is allowed to enter. Now half convinced that she has married a madman, Celia determines to discover for herself the secret beyond the door. Not-So-Harmless Villain: The viewer is led to believe that Miss Robey is a Red Herring Mole, especially after her secret is revealed halfway through the film. However, later, it becomes apparent that Miss Robey is prepared to kill for revenge. Alma intercepts her daughter, Dee Fillcot, as she is about to leave for work when she notices that her uniform is in need of repair. Dee confesses that she overheard Alma and Bertram's conversation and explains that prospective members are only considered if they are nominated by an existing member. Alma doesn't personally know any existing club members besides Rita Castillo, but she fears that Rita doesn't remember her. Despite her mother's reservations, Dee encourages her to try speaking with Rita. Like the film version of "Rebecca", this starts with the heroine (Joan Bennett) narrating the beginning of the tale, going into the saga of how she went through losing her older brother and gained a fortune, and ended up falling in love with a brooding man (Michael Redgrave) whom she met on vacation. He forgets to tell her that he is a widower and a father, and that his house is planted with infamous rooms recreated from actual crime scenes. Anne Revere gives a nuanced portrayal of his loving but somewhat overbearing sister (who basically takes care of the young son), while Barbara O'Neil goes down Mrs. Danvers territory as the scarred secretary that was on the verge of being fired before rescuing the son from a fire. One fateful day, she reads in the newspaper that one of its members, Vonda Van Esen, has died. The club famously only allows a limited number of members, so she realizes that this is her chance. She excitedly shares the news with her husband, Dr. Bertram Fillcot, who gently reminds her that the Elysian Park Garden Club consists entirely of wealthy women who have their gardens tended to by professionals. Dejected, Alma agrees that her chances of getting in are slim.

Rich, Jamie S. (September 11, 2012). "Secret Beyond the Door". DVD Talk . Retrieved February 20, 2015.

Mr. Fanservice: Michael Redgrave is shown once in his undershirt and once in the shower. And that's about as much as you can expect, given The Hays Code.She meets there three people whose existence she had not suspected: her husband's sister, who has been running things and wants to carry on (does anyone remember Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers in 'Rebecca'?); his secretary, who had hoped to marry him, and always wears a scarf round her face to hide scars from a fire; and his rather hostile son, who had no more been mentioned than the fact of a previous marriage… This recap of Why Women Kill season 2, episode 1, “Secret Beyond the Door”, and Why Women Kill season 2, episode 2, “The Woman in the Window”, contains spoilers.

Even though it's not a paranoid woman film, The Stranger (1946, Orson Welles) sees Loretta Young fling herself from doubt to indecision, unable to handle truth of any sort. Even when Edward G. Robinson FORCES HER to watch footage of Nazi concentration camps (pretty bold for 1946) she still refuses to accept the villainy that's staring her in the face, probably because the villainy is in that most precious of American sanctums, the suburban family home. The plot may creak at times like an old floorboard, Redgrave and Bennett are somewhat stiff and cold in their parts and the continuity isn't all it could be, but if like me you like film noir settings then this is for you too. Thus we get Bennett's interior monologues, lots of shots of her in front of mirrors, lots of scenes with darkened doors and symbolic keys, and even a shroud-like mist followed by a thunderstorm on the climactic night. There are some great shots of starkly-lit corridors and a wonderfully imaginative dream sequence (yes, it has those too) of Redgrave's where he's prosecuting himself in front of a judge and jury whose faces are in shadow. Dmitri Tiompkin's atmospheric score adds a lot to the overall mystery and dread, particularly at the end. Art Shift: Mark's Inner Monologue about his guilt is filmed as a courtroom scene in which Mark acts as both prosecutor and defendant in front of a faceless judge and jury. After a whirlwind romance, Celia Barrett (Bennett) marries Mark Lamphere (Redgrave) but finds once the honeymoon is over his behaviour becomes quite odd...

All Girls Want Bad Boys: Played With. Celia has an unconventional side and is drawn to Mark's unusual ways. But she is genuinely alarmed by his sudden mood swings and dark secrets. Dark and Troubled Past: It is Implied that something traumatic happened in Mark's childhood which turned his love for his mother to hatred and made him unbalanced, and caused his first marriage to fail. Ultimately Subverted. The incident that traumatised Mark was a mundane prank played by his sister Caroline, which Mark wrongly attributed to his mother. Crowther, Bosley. The New York Times, film review, "'Secret Beyond the Door,' With Joan Bennett and Michael Redgrave, Has Premiere", January 16, 1948. Accessed: July 12, 2013. Her worries are temporarily alleviated when Mark invites her to join him at the Lamphere family home, but his inexplicable mood swings continue and make her unsure of whether she has married wisely. To add to her concerns, Celia finds out that Mark already has a son from a previous marriage, that the last wife died under Mark's care, and that people suspect Mark of marrying Celia to bail him out of his precarious financial position. Vern follows Scooter on the streets and finds him entering a diner. There, he meets Dee, who gets suspicious of him. Bertram and Maisie gets drunk and sing along to each other. Upon arriving to Maisie's place, she invites him over but he rejects her offer. The next day, Alma goes shopping to buy a new dress for the party. She founds a dress she likes but is more expensive. Unable to afford the dress, she decides to recreate the dress with her own sewing materials. At the Castillo's, Rita and Carlo are having dinner but Carlo drinks instead rather than eating. He reveals that he suspects that Rita is cheating on him but she denies it. He insults her by reminding her that he once paid her. Rita gets mad and decides to cut off his drink but he threatens her about her lover. As they go to sleep, she calls Scooter and tells him that there has been a change of plans.

It's a funny thing but this film really grows on you after you've seen it a few times. In fact, on a third outing I found it quite disturbing. Admittedly the viewings were separated by some years but the initial response of disappointment and belief that it was not a typical Lang film have now changed with the latest sighting to a conviction that here indeed is the typical Fritz. You see I have now discounted some of the initial feelings about it being just a women's soap opera with Babs O'Neil making a fair fist of a sort of poor woman's Mrs Danvers. I think the best character in this film was definitely Joan Bennett. I liked the idea that she would basically be turned on by Michael Redgrave and the other man fighting, and she seemed even more turned on when the thrown knife narrowly missed stabbing her hand. I wish that her motivation for marrying Redgrave would have been made a little more clearer, or if we'd seen more scenes of him romancing her or something. While it most definitely was an impetuous decision on their parts, it comes across as a very naive decision as well. I am okay with the whirlwind romance, but I think there needed to be more exposition. I liked her scenes at the end. Though much like other 1940s films that depict psychology, it seems that Michael Redgrave's therapy session (so to speak) and Joan's assessment of his condition seemed a bit rushed and too pat. This is a man who builds replicas of rooms where famous murders took place and we're supposed to believe that his whole issue boils down to being constantly dominated by women? Now he's cured and they'll live happily ever after? This film sees Mark (Michael Redgrave) with a psychological problem. There are a few things wrong in his head, eg, he collects rooms where murders have been committed. He lays these rooms out exactly as they were, with original artifacts, at the time the murders were committed and devotes a wing of his house to them. When Celia (Joan Bennett) marries him, she only discovers his passion when a rain storm ruins the outside house-warming party they are giving, and he brings the guests indoors for a tour of the house.Mood-Swinger: One moment Mark is kissing Celia passionately and the next moment he looks like he positively loathes her. Sometimes you can't please the public no matter what you do - but then again, making something that is so directly a psychological twisty-turny melodramatic thriller (with direct shades of Rebecca as it's about a man bringing home a new wife and the, uh, complications that arise in the general comparison sense) will confront people. But apparently this was a debacle when it came out, or at least that's how it's purported in history: an over-budget, over-scheduled shoot where producer-director Fritz Lang clashed with star Joan Bennett, who later used the Heaven's Gate critique - "an unqualified disaster". Rufus King's novel Museum Piece No. Thirteen, upon which the film was based, also appeared in the Dec 1945 issue of Red Book magazine under the title The Secret Beyond the Door. The film opens with a voice-over narration spoken by Joan Bennett. Contemporary sources indicate that British actor Michael Redgrave made his U.S. film debut in the picture, although RKO's production of Mourning Becomes Electra (see above), which Redgrave filmed immediately afterward, was released just prior to Secret Beyond the Door. According to contemporary sources, director Fritz Lang wanted Milton Krasner as director of photography, but Bennett, a partner with Lang and producer Walter Wanger in Diana Productions, insisted that Stanley Cortez be used. Contemporary sources reveal Lang's first choice for Mark Lamphere was James Mason. In addition, modern sources note that Ring Larder, Jr. was initially considered as the film's screenwriter and that the final script, by Silvia Richards and Lang (uncredited), took nearly a year to complete. Psychiatry, plus a suggestion of the Bluebeard legend, plus a lot of Gothic glooms, was the essence of Fritz Lang's thriller…