Mobile Navigation
Directed by Fritz Lang
Like many Hollywood woman's melodramas, Fritz Lang's The Secret Beyond The Door begins with a plot twist: a young woman marries a man she barely knows and soon suspects he's trying to drive her insane. Gothic themes of madness, mixed with Freudian psychoanalysis were particularly en vogue in the late 1940s and the story here affords Lang the opportunity to indulge in expressionist shadowscapes as well as his long-standing interest in architecture and its metaphoric connotations. Ultimately, however, the film is less about psychoanalysis, than about Stanley Cortez's beautifully photographed post-modern pastiche of gothic and expressionist imagery.
Diana Productions, Inc. / Universal. Based on a novel by Rufus King. Producer: Fritz Lang. Screenplay: Silvia Richards. Cinematographer: Stanley Cortez. Editor: Arthur Hilton. Cast: Joan Bennett, Michael Redgrave, Anne Revere, Barbara O'Neil, Natalie Schafer.
35mm, 99 min.
