Secret Beyond the Door

Fritz Lang, whose German expressionist movies helped create film noir, saw his disciple Alfred Hitchcock surge ahead of him in Hollywood. With this psychoanalytical thriller incorporating elements of Rebecca , Suspicion and Spellbound , he sought to establish he was Hitch's equal. It proved a critical and commercial disaster but is now widely seen as a key example of Lang's "fantastical realism". A sublime, delirious melodrama, it stars Joan Bennett as a sleepwalking heiress who meets a charming architect (Michael Redgrave) in Mexico, and marries in haste. He turns out to have a bizarre family past and a weird present that includes re-creating in the basement of his New England mansion the rooms where famous murders occurred. Redgrave was cast because of his schizophrenic ventriloquist in Dead of Night . The outstanding photography is by Stanley Cortez, who shot The Magnificent Ambersons and The Night of the Hunter . The noir score is the work of Miklós Rózsa, who won Oscars for Spellbound and Ben-Hur . The surreal credit titles were executed at the Disney Studio.