A Film Canon

The third - and finest - of Lang's dream-noirs, Secret Beyond The Door takes the premise that "the way a place is built determines what happens in it" to its aesthetic conclusion, building a narrative around architect Mark Lamphere's (Michael Redgrave) collection, reconstruction and examination of rooms in which iconic murders have occurred, for the purpose of analysing the murderous impulse he feels upon entering his recent wife's (Joan Bennett) bedroom, the only room in his museum which is merely replicated, rather than transplanted; or, rather fused with its replication to imbue both with an abstracted, figurative quality. That said, this quality extends to all the spaces in the film, thanks to a variety of techniques (long shots, low angles, slightly larger-than-life sets) that ensure that the couple are not only dwarfed by the spaces they inhabit, but frequently seem to simply appear within them, as mere manifestations of their particular characteristics. At its strongest, this imbues the human body - particularly the face - with an architectural plasticity, whether in the form of the masks that decorate Lamphere's mansion, his secretary's pretence of disfigurement, or Bennett's peculiar ability to reduce superlative uncertainty to a pregnant blankness, or lack of net movement; the "flat, gold, shimmering stillness" of a pre-cyclonic sky. It also imbues sight with a near-prehensile agency, contributing to the exquisite sense of sexualised surveillance accompanying Celia's gradual realisation that her husband's eyes are continuous with every space he has built or studied: "I felt eyes touching me, like fingers". Even the dialogue and narration take on a peculiarly architectural quality - the former by virtue of Silvia Richard's poetic screenplay, which constantly finds spatial, or at least visual, analogies for psychological phenomena; the latter by virtue of Bennett's dreamy, hushed whisper, which makes every utterance sound as if it is being spoken in an echo chamber, or trying to elude some threatening third party.