Secret beyond the Door

In this thriller, a woman marries an architect whose house contains his painstaking re-creations of rooms in which brutal murders were committed. Furthermore, there's a first wife which she never knew about and a jealous secretary. The echoes of Hitchcock's Rebecca attracted director Fritz Lang to the project, his third co-producing venture with actress Joan Bennett after The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. It is visually accomplished but, with Michael Redgrave lacking romantic appeal as the architect, a complicated flashback structure and a climax that combines lurid melodrama with Freudian explanations, the result is heavy going and pretentious.