MartinHafer "Secret Beyond the Door..." is a reworking of "Rebecca". While there are plenty of differences, there are enough similarities that you can assume the Daphne Du Maurier was the starting point for the story from "Secret Beyond the Door...". However, there's one huge difference, one that makes the later film harder to enjoy. In "Rebecca", the new wife was naive, young and a bit dim. In "Secret", she (Joan Bennett) is supposed to be much more worldly, educated and older....and so her actions really don't make a lot of sense. When the film begins, Celia is being castigated by her brother for not settling down and getting married. She tells him she's having too much fun...and has no plans to settle down. Then, inexplicably, she meets a man and almost immediately marries him...though she knows little about Mark (Michael Redgrave). Well, soon after, she learns that he completely misrepresented himself--he'd already been married AND he had a teenage son. These things he casually 'forgot' to tell Celia. At the same time, Mark has gone from clever and sweet to a dark, brooding and obnoxious guy....with apparently little love for Celia. Now at this point, what would any sane woman do? They certainly would NOT stay...and as more and more evidence mounts up that Mark might be insane and dangerous, Celia stays!! Even when he shows off his 'murder rooms'--recreation of rooms where various women were murdered---she stays! Does this make sense? Nope. Did it work in "Rebecca"....well, a heck of a lot better than in this moody, atmospheric but ultimately goofy film that makes little sense. Add to that some inane narration as Celia speaks her mind aloud during much of the movie and you've got a film that looks good but leaves the viewer frustrated...frustrated at how dumb Celia is AND at how there's little in the way of subtlety or intelligence behind all this. Despite some quality actors and a famous director (Fritz Lang), it's a bad movie that LOOKS good...with lovely cinematography, music and an appropriate mood. Too bad it didn't even end well as has Celia playing armchair psychologist and attempting to cure her psychotic hubby!

clanciai Joan Bennett is always good and reliable and worth seeing, and so is Michael Redgrave, no matter how weird characters he makes, and this is one of the weirdest. As a pychological thriller it's not quite credible, Joan Bennett showing some astonishing carelessness in now and then going into panic, and Michael Redgrave unable to control himself almost as a somnambulist. The supporting characters are almost more interesting, and the boy seems to be the only clever one. What actually makes this film is the effects, above all Miklos Rosza's always tremendous music, but also Fritz Lang's knack of conjuring some magic, here especially Joan Bennett losing herself in dark corridors - it happens demonstrably frequently in this film. All these effects tend to tower up to some exaggerated theatricalness, while as a psychological thriller it would have been more efficient with less. But it's great cinematic magic, all the way to the end.

calvinnme This thing is somewhat like Rebecca, in a way. There is an impulsive marriage of a young woman, Celia (Joan Bennett) to a mysterious man, Mark (Michael Redgrave). After the marriage Celia finds out he has been married before, except this time, there is a son by that marriage. And her husband has a personal assistant who is facially deformed and is prone to setting fires. However, Celia is not like Rebecca. She is full of life and not unsure of herself at all.One night, shortly after their marriage, Mark, an architect, talks about how he "collects" rooms as a hobby at a party at their house. Before the guests go look at the rooms, Celia tells the guests how her husband has said in the past that happy occasions are often tied to the rooms in which they occur. However, this tour is not one of happy events, instead all of the rooms are replicas of rooms in which grisly murders have occurred, and the new husband has the murders and the rooms down to the last detail. The look on Celia's face shows that she is suddenly wondering what exactly is going on in the head of that husband of hers.And then one more secret..there is a door where Mark is working away on another replica room where Bennett is not allowed to go. Then one day she manages to get in and finds....I'll let you watch and find out. Let me just say if not for the great visual style of Lang, the fact that Michael Redgrave had a knack for being creepy when he wants to and Joan Bennett could aptly project just about any emotion, and don't forget the score, this thing would have been a total washout, because the ideas are not that original and the ending is just not all that it was built up to be, given all of the wind machines, at least not for me.

oparthenon I did not like this film. I did not like it at all. Hence be prepared, for my comments are entirely negative. I too love Hitchcock, and I place him and Fritz Lang in the front line of innovative directors from the Golden Age of cinema...but even Homer nodded, as the expression goes, and there is much in Hitchcock that can make one yawn, fidget in one's seat, and ultimately get up and change the DVD. The Parradine Case and the disastrous Mr and Mrs Smith are often cited as Hitch-failures, but for me, Rebecca and The Lady Vanishes are also both unwatchable: drab, dreary, confusing, cheerless, humourless, one-note films with excessively mannered acting and production values that shout out, "Please look at me, I'm a (gothic, noir, or what-have-you) film." Secret Beyond the Door joins these over-the-top scorchers; to me, these films are all failures at what used to be called "women's weepies" (films made chiefly with the female audience in mind) with noir and Gothic elements added with a view towards widening the audience appeal.In Secret Beyond the Door, Lang (or someone who paid Lang a sum of money) clearly wanted to make a film to rival Hitch, and he chose -- dismayingly, as far as I'm concerned -- Rebecca as his model. I enter a plea of guilty, as Cecil Vyse in Forster's Room With a View would have remarked: I did not care for Miklos Rosza's excessively worked-up score, Stanley Cortez' unremarkable cinematography, and Lang's lustreless direction, which goes nowhere (ex: the town Michael Redgrave's Mark lives in is Levender Falls...when we arrive there with Joan Bennet's Celia, where are we? Nowhere. A colourless, non-descript postcard blown up for the background matte shot...a few bicycles, someone dressed up like a porter...we could be anywhere and are nowhere. Besides, what does Levender Falls mean? Spoiled lavender? ***spoiler*** Later at the station Joan Bennet picks what looks like a sprig of lavender and puts it in her lapel before running to greet Mark as he gets off the train...as he is about to kiss her, he spies the lavender and goes into this crazy trance that marks his obsessive-compulsive neurosis. ***end spoiler*** All of this is photographed as if we are at a Sunday school picnic and Lang and Cortez are scoutmasters.)There are so many other examples of trite imagery, stale sets, and failure to follow up on motivic set-ups, that they are not worth mentioning. The one plus is Joan Bennet, looking remarkably luminous in this film and as breezy and nonchalant as ever -- though I must admit she was never so good as she was in Lang's true Hollywood masterpiece, Woman in the Window. Proof that a strong script and committed actors can provide a director with the impetus needed to work a celluloid miracle.Unfortunately somebody was asleep at the wheel in Secret Beyond the Door, and it wasn't the audience.A film to skip unless you are a devoted Lang aficionado (as I am) who wants to watch even the bad ones that blooped up from his Hollywood era.