Among the worst cheats a film can do is to end with the revelation everything that transpired before it was a dream. Even worse is to have a film that is so strange one is surprised it doesn’t conclude with that twist.
Without such a twist, I am at a loss to explain most of what happens in 1947’s Secret Beyond the Door, an alleged noir which is so disconnected in so many ways from reality that the most generous adjective I can apply to it is “dreamlike”. And yet, I am far more inclined to use the word “bullshit”.
Even the plot of this is difficult to explain in a succinct manner. To even sum it up in a paragraph would not do justice to how awkwardly the developments unfold. It’s like somebody binge-watched Suspicion, Rebecca and Spellbound, fell asleep and then wrote down the resulting dream fragments later.
The film’s center is unquestionably Joan Bennett. I have seen her in some excellent movies, but I find her to be largely a functional presence in many pictures which were unremarkable. She is a solid and dependable actress, but I will never choose to watch a film just because she is in it.
The story proper begins with her and friend Natalie Schafer (Mrs. Thurston Howell, the Third!) in Mexico, witnessing a knife fight that breaks out between two men over a woman. Bennett is very interested by this, thinking in voiceover, “There was a tingling at the nape of my neck.” Judging from her body language, I doubt that’s where the tingling was occurring. And yet, she isn’t even startled by a thrown knife that lands in a tabletop just inches from her. I should have known better than to hope she would grab it and join in the mayhem.
Instead, she spies Michael Redgrave across the courtyard and is immediately swept away by her lust for him. I found this very odd, as Redgrave’s character here is the definition of dispassionate. He seems like a man sculpted out of oatmeal, and I suspect his favorite color is beige. Wooing her, he says she reminds him of a weather phenomenon he once witnessed in South Dakota, and I’m pretty sure no woman wants to be seduced by being compared to anything from either Dakota.
Which makes is all the more surprising the numbers and varieties of weirdness he has in store for her when she first sets foot in his mansion following their honeymoon. I only expected yet another housekeeper whose role model would be Rebecca’s Mrs. Danvers. Instead, she get his sister (Anne Revere) who treats him like a child, a secretary who wears a wears a scarf in the weirdest way possible to conceal the burns on the left side of her face (Barbara O’Neill) and an unpleasant son (Mark Dennis) who always wears a suit and tie around the house. He also is forever with a book whose title we never learn, though my money is on it being something by Ayn Rand.
These characters, and others, reside in a mansion with wings, the number and size of which I swear change of the course of the runtime. I felt less like we were in a true physical space and more that we were in a dream-space akin to the realm of the titular Sandman from Neil Gaiman’s works. One such space is his home office, where Redgrave does his architectural drawings, though I could have sworn his income was only supposed to be from a magazine he publishes. Maybe it a hobby, and a unique one at that. Also, Revere seems to only exist in this room until we see her elsewhere in the third act.
Another space are the seven rooms that are full-size recreations of ones where famous murders occurred. There are props arranged carefully so as to replicate the scenes of the crimes. It makes the Nutshell Study dioramas of Frances Glessner Lee look amateurish in comparison. Also, it appears Bluebeard was yet another inspiration for this script.
One room is closed off from all eyes but his, and I felt no pride whatsoever in correctly guessing the secret behind the titular door. I actually call shame on the script for having such a daft twist.
I mentioned Bennett’s voiceover earlier, and is present throughout the film. It is among the strangest narration I have encountered in film, simply because it never raises above a whisper and is spoken quite slowly. It’s like she guzzled cough syrup before stepping up to the mic. The closest analog I can think of is the hypnotic voiceover work in Lars von Trier’s The Element of Crime, though only in technique and not to the extent of its success.
Compounding the picture’s many wrongs is dialog that scans as clever until giving it even a second of additional consideration. Consider this: “She had a certain charm, but it had more of an enameled quality.” I think I get what is being conveyed, but that is clunky and as disconnected from normal human conversation as I assume the target of that quip is from casual human behavior. Another line that has stuck in craw long after the end is Schafer telling Bennett, “It was a wonderful party. I got rid of gallons of repressed poison.” I can imagine Truman Capote rolling his eyes at that one and then thinking up ten better lines to relay the same sentiment.
Even worse is the armchair psychology employed throughout, which comes to a head in a deeply risible finale. The similarly laughable analysis in Hitchcock’s Spellbound feels like a doctoral course in comparison. That film was also a collaboration with Dali, and I find it telling the opening credits of this film appear over an illustration that is like a starving artist was commissioned to make this like one of his paintings.
To return to my first point, Secret Beyond the Door is never revealed to be a dream, and so there is no sufficient explanation for the offness of this work. It isn’t just the blatant elements such as these, either, but little details like a train station for the improbably named “LEVENDER FALLS” (note: intentionally not “lavender”). One bit I can’t stop pondering is why there is a seemingly pointless crossfade between Bennett sitting in a chair and rising up out of it. If what we’re seeing isn’t the product of somebody’s subconscious, then we have something as weird and uncertain of itself as a mixed metaphor that character says at one point: “I buttered my bread and now I have to lie in it.”
Dir: Fritz Lang (really?)
Starring Joan Bennett, Michael Redgrave
Watched on Olive Films blu-ray