Festival of Preservation 2009: Joan Bennett, Michael Redgrave, William Powell, Fay Wray, William Desmond Taylor

Tonight at 7:30 pm at UCLA’s Festival of Preservation you’ll be able to catch a screening of Fritz Lang’s unfairly neglected Secret Beyond the Door (above), a 1947 noirish psychological melodrama starring Joan Bennett as woman married to Michael Redgrave, whom she suspects is out to kill her (possibly for her money).
Unlike Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) and George Cukor’s similarly themed Gaslight (1944), Secret Beyond the Door boasts a highly stylized Gothic feel that makes the viewer feel just as off-kilter as both the heroine and the hero. Stanley Cortez, who also shot Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons, was the cinematographer.
Tomorrow, Sunday, April 5, at 7pm, the Festival of Preservation will feature two rarities from the 1910s: Lena Rivers, a [...]