Secret Beyond the Door
Director: Fritz Lang
Year Released: 1947
Rating: 2.0
Single Celia (Joan Bennett), desperate to find a husband, has a connection with Mark (Michael Redgrave) in Mexico - she falls in love and they marry, but after a while she starts wondering what happened to his deceased first wife and whether she was killed. Lang's attempt to do Hitchcock is quite heavy-handed and loaded with nonstop red flags - Mark has a collection of weird masks, he lies constantly, he blows through fortunes, there are odd women around his house, his creepy son gives off school shooter vibes, he had an unhealthy relationship with his mother and, most telling of all, he's designed "happy rooms" in his home that are recreations of murder scenes - but Celia sticks around anyway, revealing her 'inner state' with excessive voice over. You can tell Lang was flirting with an interest in psychoanalysis - it gets mentioned several times - but Celia's playing shrink at the end (to "diagnose" Mark's condition) is a step too far.