What did you watch? The 1947 thriller Secret Beyond The Door.

Ooh, what was the secret? It wasn’t much of a thriller. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Secret Beyond The Door is one of many movies directed by Fritz Lang starring Joan Bennett, two others being The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. My favorite that I’ve seen would be Scarlet Street. Like The Woman In The Window, Secret… feels like a bit of a dream, but a modern take might be that it’s nightmare that Joan Bennett’s character will never wake up from despite clearing things up for her love interest in the end.

Joan is Celia, who is introduced by her elder brother Rick to his new lawyer, Bob. Bob and Celia hit it off immediately, and Rick is like “good, because Bob is taking care of my will and I might not be alive much longer,” as he pulls out a pack of cigarettes. Then, the next scene, he’s dead, and Bob is going over her inheritance. Also, he likes her, they should get married. BUT, he encourages Celia to go to Mexico for a trip to get any second doubts out of her system. So, she does, and in witnessing a knife fight between two men over another woman, she locks eyes with Mark. They fall in love, so quick, they decide to get married. The wedding is a surreal quiet affair, in dark lighting with everyone shrouded and praying, and it feels like a sparsely attended funeral.

That’s about as quick as anything is going to happen in this movie. The suspense starts soon after, where Mark has to attend to some business back home, leaving her behind. But there’s some smoke & mirrors, she isn’t sure he’s actually left. There’s a lot of stuff like that going on here where she feels a bit gaslighted, and I felt like we were still in the first reel of this film – she is flown back to Mark’s estate, where she meets Mark’s sister, Caroline, and their housekeeper, Miss Robey. She eventually meets David, Mark’s son from a previous marriage, discovering that not only does Mark have a son, but also is a widower, with suspicions about her death.

This movie is in black & white so she can’t see the multitude of red flags going on, but don’t worry – everyone in the compound treats her like garbage. David is a snooty weirdo who is blunt about his distaste for his father and the idea of someone moving in in his mother’s place, Caroline keeps asking Celia when she’s going to take over the managing of the house, and Miss Robey is a creepy weirdo who lies about being disfigured. Mark never acts normal upon returning home. He’s very stressed out because he publishes a magazine which he needs to sell because it is not profitable.

Mark & Celia have a big party where he walks everyone around the compound to show off his six special rooms, all recreations of where some woman was murdered by her husband. A seventh room has a LOCKED DOOR, do you see where we’re going with this? Bob is present, and I bet this tears him up inside. He informs Celia either out of spite or out of concern that Mark’s magazine is in fact profitable, and that the compound is a financial black hole. So, likely, Mark needs to sell the magazine to keep the house and its 7 rooms dedicated to murder.

Oh, the 7th room? Celia finds a key, makes a copy, and opens it – it’s a recreation of HER room in the mansion!

Celia and Mark agree to send creepy David to New York for school, and Caroline will go with him because she can’t get away from this house and life to start living her own soon enough. This doesn’t keep Mark from acting like a stressed out serial killer, and when Celia opens the 7th murder room to encourage him to face the night his first wife kills, Mark is like “look, it’s apparently my psychological imperative to kill you,” and goes in for the kill, with Celia ready to face her death at his hands. BUT WAIT! A fire starts – it’s Miss Robey! Mark saves Celia by breaking out of the murder room, and they live happily ever after.

Was it noir? No.

Was it good? oh, geez, no.

I would forgive this movie’s slow pace if Mark weren’t such a mentally abusive turd. He seemed pretty all in to marrying Celia up until the day after he marries her. Then all this stuff comes out of left field – his first wife who is dead, sullen snob of a son, a ridiculous mansion that is overly mortgaged to the point where he has to sell his publishing company, and the rooms dedicated to murder. We are getting into House on Haunted Hill territory here. So, Mark, ewww. He ain’t worth it, Celia.

(A few years later, Joan’s husband would shoot her agent in a fit of jealousy. He served a few months and continued to make films, but she was practically blacklisted. They stayed married for 14 more years!)

The movie is SLOOOW after that whirlwind courtship. And it’s boring, and the tension over what’s in that 7th room feels misplaced. There are better mysteries with better clues than “oh, he built a room just like the one his late wife was killed in.” I’d excuse him as being a rich eccentric but look at what we’re dealing with in modern times with rich eccentrics. Geez. So, I guess they live happily ever after, but unless Mark is like “OMG, this whole time I thought I was a murderer! But I’m not! I’ve estranged myself from my family and I’ve built this stupid maze to death for no reason! I’m a totally different person who doesn’t drag out information to pull at your emotions from now on!” I imagine that he’ll just keep her wondering what the next melodrama she’ll have to be prepared for constantly is.

There’s a few moments of interest, including some interesting shots where she runs out of the mansion in a paranoid fear into the woods and we see a silhouette of a man about to confront her, but it’s a fake scare. You’d think they’d replicate something like that when she’s really in danger, but no. The wedding in the Mexican church was perfectly foreboding, but for us, the viewer.

I’m not worried about Bob, but fellas…and the ladies: was this ever you? Did you ever meet someone special but they ended up jumping into someone else’s arms and you think “well, that’s love?” and then you meet the new significant other and (s)he’s a turd, and their life together is one careening into a figurative brick wall and she’ll never see it until it’s too late? Or, who are we to judge? Jeez, maybe it’s Bob, and myself, who need more therapy.