An intelligent and mature, even poetic take on the Bluebeard myth that both embraces and subverts high Freudian concepts, directed by Fritz Lang. Joan Bennett is Celia Barrett, a New York heiress and socialite who, tiring of stolid and supercilious would-be mates, and depressed over her older brother’s (Paul Cavanagh) death, heads south of the border with her friend Edith Potter (Natalie Schafer). There, hypnotised by the spectacle of two men fighting over a woman, she barely blinks when one man’s knife lands inches from her hand, attracting the fixated attention of another in the crowd, architect and magazine writer Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave). Each is instantly impressed with the other, Celia taken by Mark’s intense, perverse romanticism, and he by Celia’s death-defying grit. After a whirlwind romance, they take a chance on a quickie wedding, but Mark avoids the much-anticipated wedding night. Mark is the repressed scion of an upstate
The early sequences of Secret Beyond The Door lead in unexpected ways into a relatively familiar story set-up, as the heroine’s lilting, sonorous voiceover, replete with fragments of poesy and analytical art, contends with dreams and symbols that anticipate danger, and finds chances for transcendence and reformation inextricable from deadly risks. The tragic adventure of her marriage commence in virtually fairy-tale environs of old Mexico with its coin-strewn wishing wells winking back at the stars, manifold candle flames and masses of blossoms speckling the frames of Stanley Cortez’s luminous black and white photography, the enacting of primal lusts and pride in the fighting men and their prize senorita. Celia herself ventures down the aisle clad in traditional Latin wedding attire, but not as a naïf like her analogous doppelgangers in Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), but as a woman wilfully enjoining a psychosexual voyage of discovery, having, like Bette Davis’ fellow adventurer in Now, Voyager (1941), fled the settled order of urbane America for southern climes and their attendant mystique, even if Celia’s journey, from independent assurance to settled domesticity, is the reverse of Davis’. Figuration of psychic phenomena moves out of the realm of underpinning interpretation and into literal plot motif as Mark’s collection of murder rooms proves an attempt to substantiate and explore his theory that physical setting can influence and define psychological reactions, a theory that a snotty young psych student (Anabel Shaw) takes exception to. Mark exhibits his rooms like Vincent Price shows off his chamber of horror in House of Wax (1953), relishing the charge of morbid eroticism in the paraphernalia of long-ago pain. But it’s clear that Mark, after the traumas that have defined the recent history of the Lamphere house, has transformed it into a manifestation of his own psychological obsessions, as he contends with a repetitive urge to kill his new wife for reasons he doesn’t comprehend.
If made in the last twenty years, such a narrative would inevitably culminate in the homicidal husband transformed into a caricature of bestial masculinity brought down like a tyrannosaurus in a hail of bullets, but here the emphasis is a merely exaggerated version of the usual perils of partnership. Lang had handled many a psychological thriller before, including, of course, M (1931), but the imagery calls to mind more his early silent work like Der Muede Tod (1921, itself a profound influence on Hitchcock, in whose footsteps Lang here seems doomed to tread), with Redgrave taking on the part as the lover-annihilator standing at the crossroads of sex and death. The easily recognisable basis of the story in the folktale tradition Charles Perrault ransacked seeks to analyse and deconstruct the schismatic assumptions and figurations of those tales, as transformative capacities and rational defusing of seemingly primordial problems doggedly assert themselves as alternatives to destructive impulses and aberrant behaviour. Meanwhile Lang and Bennett pull off a neat volte face from their collaboration on The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945) as Bennett’s femme fatale in those two movies is reconfigured into a male equivalent she must fathom or be destroyed by. Undoubtedly part of the post-war noir fashion in blending shadowy visuals and psychic instability, it’s less related to the corrosive, murderous cynicism usually associated with noir than to the poetic-realist mystique of Jacques Tourneur, whose The Leopard Man (1942) bears some distinct resemblances. It’s also part of a distinct sub-strata of noir that called almost be called, like Max Ophuls’ Caught (1949), femme-noir, where the preponderance of empathy and viewpoint is weighted on female protagonists in danger but also in a kind of adult control, refusing the hysterical rage of the other noir films in favour of a supply erotic mood that permeates the storytelling.
Celia refuses to give into the temptation to see Mark as an alien but as a man she loves contending with a torturing other within himself. She sets out to penetrate his mind in the literal act of penetrating the seventh, eternally private and locked chamber he keeps, a new murder room that proves to resemble her own boudoir. The revelation of Mark’s repressed murderous rage as being sourced in a seemingly trivial childhood disappointment caused by his sister locking him in his bedroom when he had hoped to see his mother off proves to have been a nexus for fears of abandonment and imprisonment, is a bit weak, and the happy ending glibly rushed, but Silvia Richards’ excellent screenplay offers up plentiful fragments of strange beauty, including the lengthy, almost imperceptibly disquieting scenes leading up to Mark’s feeing the marriage bed in Mexico as versions of male and female wisdom are contrasted, Celia’s proprietorial maid Paquita (Rosa Rey) offering cheeky advice and Mark’s apparently glib misogyny anticipating both his anger with being dominated by women and his desire to embrace an anti-intellectual, intuitive revolt, just exactly what he hopes to gain from Celia. Meanwhile other masks fall away, again not metaphorically, as Robey is revealed to have had the scars that afflicted her, and justified her place in the Lamphere house, erased by surgery, and her pyromaniac jealousy proves responsible for more than one tragedy in the household. O’Neill, with her vulpine eyes that suggest infernal passions under a placid surface, had played a similar role of enabling springboard for Charles Boyer’s murderous streak in All This, and Heaven Too (1940).
Celia and Mark’s initial attraction at a scene of murderous violence proves, brilliantly, to have been a kind of mutual casting to enact roles each needs the other to fill, Mark requiring a woman brave enough to defy death to survive his inevitable rage if he’s to stand a chance of escaping his fate, Celia needing a task beyond the ordinary to realise her thus far smothered talents for instinctual, as opposed to the student’s programmatic understanding, psychological warfare. The film builds to a clever double-bluff as it enters its third act, as Celia’s fate is left unclear for a time after she flees the mansion, only to encounter a shadowy figure in the fog-wreathed grounds. Lang dips back into pure expressionism as Mark loses himself in a guilty fantasy of being tried before a faceless judge and jury, playing both prosecutor and defendant, arguing if a man has the power of moral judgment and therefore responsibility if his subconscious is overwhelming his conscious mind, as if ego and super-ego are battling for the sake of keeping the rampant id from taking over. But the finale is positive, as both spouses rescue each other in divergent fashions. The film’s studious pace and slight over-length do limit its impact, as does Lang’s perhaps innate refusal to emphasise the frenzied reflexes of the melodrama, unlike in his best work like M and Fury (1936), or the usual socially analytical edge to his narratives. But it’s still a gripping and beautiful work. Whilst looking forward to other deconstructions of mythic psychology like Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984) and Catherine Breillat’s recent revisions, Secret Beyond The Door’s specific influence on Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980) is hard to mistake even without the tip-off casting of Bennett in the former.
