Behind Locked Doors (1948)

September 3, 1948, release date

Directed by Oscar (“Budd”) Boeticher

Screenplay by Eugene Ling, Malvin Wald

Based on a story by Malvin Wald

Music by Irving Friedman

Edited by Norman Colbert

Cinematography by Guy Roe

Lucille Bremer as Kathy Lawrence

Richard Carlson as Ross Stewart

Douglas Fowley as Larson

Ralf Harolde as Fred Hopps

Thomas Browne Henry as Dr. Clifford Porter

Herbert Heyes as Judge Finlay Drake

Gwen Donovan as Madge Bennett

Tor Johnson as Butcher Blackmer, the Champ, a patient

John Holland as Dr. J. R. Ball

Wally Vernon as the sign painter

Distributed by Eagle-Lion Films

Produced by Arc Productions Inc.

I had never heard of Behind Locked Doors. I can’t even remember how I came across it. I was already familiar with Eagle-Lion Films, so I decided to take a chance, and I’m glad I did. Behind Locked Doors is a low-budget film that looks a bit more polished than its Poverty Row roots would suggest. And it is not just a simple film noir: It has romance, social commentary, and a bit of humor, too.

For more information about Eagle-Lion Films and the other so-called Poverty Row studios, click on each list item below:

◊ Wikipedia: “Eagle-Lion Films”

◊ Film Reference: “The Bs of Poverty Row”

◊ Arcadia Publishing and the History Press: Early Poverty Row Studios

The opening credits appear over a shot of a barred window in the top half of a steel-bolted door. The lighting outside the door casts shadows from the bars into the interior of a room, which gives viewers the perspective of being inside a locked room. The film then starts with a shot of a car at night moving toward the camera and parking at the curb on a tree-lined street. The driver who gets out of the car is a woman wearing a mink coat. Viewers learn later that she is Madge Bennett. Another car pulls up behind the first and parks there. A second woman, later identified as Kathy Lawrence, gets out of the second car and follows the woman in the mink coat. The woman in the mink coat turns at the street corner and heads to an entrance for La Siesta Sanitarium. So viewers know from the start that the film’s title doesn’t refer to a prison.

The film cuts to a daytime street view, with the camera looking up at the façade of an office building, then to a shot of an office door with lettering that reads: “Ross Stewart / Private Investigator.” Stewart doesn’t have the money to pay the man who has just finished the lettering. When Stewart pulls some bills out of his wallet, the man grabs one of them. Like other detectives in film noir and B films in general, Stewart is down on his luck and in need of a paying job. The humorous banter between Stewart and the worker makes Stewart’s need for work clear. Kathy Lawrence appears at Stewart’s front door just at this opportune moment. She is a reporter at the San Francisco Tribune, and she has a job for Stewart: his first client.

The scene between Stewart and the man lettering his office door provides some humor, and the first scene between Lawrence and Stewart provides a bit more. Being short of cash isn’t the only reason Stewart is interested—at first—in Lawrence’s assignment. He is also attracted to her, as the following bit of dialogue shows:

• Stewart: [leaning toward Lawrence] “I’m your man. I shadow, investigate, prove and disprove suspicion. And dance divinely. All at reasonable rates.”

• Lawrence: “I can’t pay you a fee.”

• Stewart: [sitting back] “This changes the picture.”

It seems, according to Lawrence, that a corrupt judge, Judge Finlay Drake, has disappeared, and someone has placed a reward for the judge’s return to justice. Lawrence wants to split the $10,000 reward with Stewart if he will only find the judge. She tells Stewart that Dr. Clifford Porter, once the state medical officer, runs La Siesta Sanitarium. Madge Bennett is the judge’s girlfriend, and Lawrence thinks Bennett is visiting the judge at the sanitarium.

(This blog post about Behind Locked Doors contains spoilers.)

Lawrence’s plan is to have Stewart pose as her husband so she can have him committed and moved into the sanitarium, and he can start his (their) investigation. Stewart refuses Lawrence’s offer at first. He won’t have himself committed to find the judge. But he changes his mind after tailing Madge Bennett to the sanitarium himself; now he knows that Lawrence has a solid lead for the investigation and the subsequent reward. Stewart can use that information as a basis for Lawrence’s trustworthiness. With his need for some cash and his attraction to Lawrence, Stewart has some additional incentive to pursue the investigation.

Stewart takes the name Harry Horton. He and Lawrence meet with Dr. J. R. Ball, state psychiatrist for the Department of Mental Hygiene. Lawrence describes Stewart’s (faked) symptoms, and Stewart is admitted to La Siesta Sanitarium after a brief interview (and no paperwork, or none that I could see; was this before the health insurance industry became such a goliath?).

Once Stewart is hospitalized, it becomes pretty clear that one of the sanitarium attendants, Larson, is hostile to all his peers and subordinates and to all the sanitarium patients. This is the narrative thread that reveals some social commentary about the conditions in the sanitarium. One of Stewart’s roommates, Purvis, warns Stewart: “. . . He’s [Larson is] the one you gotta watch around here. You came here to be cured? You’re more likely to be killed.”

Stewart begins to suspect that Judge Finlay Drake may be hiding in the locked ward of the sanitarium. When he asks Purvis about the locked ward, Purvis tells him:

A couple of violents are kept there all the time. Under restraint, they call it. Too much trouble to try and cure them with any kind of treatment Have you heard of the isolation room they’ve got there, too? Bare room. Padded walls. They throw you a blanket. You sleep on the floor. Oh, yes, this is a very high-class sanitarium. Fine care and treatment you get here. You pay extra well to be treated like a dog. [raising his voice until now he is shouting] Try to complain about it. Try and protest about anything and what do you get? I’ll tell you what you get. The extra special treatment . . . .

Larson arrives to drag Purvis out of the room—and thus proves Purvis’s point. When Purvis is brought back in the middle of the night, he is badly beaten.

Stewart’s questions and sneaking around don’t go unnoticed. Larson is quick to pick up on his movements. Stewart acknowledges to Lawrence during one of her visits to the sanitarium that confirming his suspicions about the judge’s whereabouts is getting more difficult—and more dangerous. Lawrence starts to worry more about Stewart’s safety than about the reward money and her newspaper story. Thus, the romance thread of the narrative isn’t a loose end after all: It seems that Stewart’s feelings for Lawrence are being reciprocated.

All of these elements—Stewart’s investigation, the hostile and dangerous conditions at the sanitarium (with its chances for social commentary), and the budding romance between Stewart and Lawrence—are vital parts of the plot. Nothing felt like it was added on for good measure. The two lead characters (Lawrence and Stewart) are allowed to develop enough so that they become sympathetic. Viewers find Stewart sympathetic in the way that he treats his fellow inmates at the sanitarium. He shows compassion, especially in contrast to Larson, who is supposed to be taking care of all of them. Kathy Lawrence may not see all of his good deeds in the sanitarium, but she falls for Stewart as she gets to know him better, and she is the one who comes to his aid when he needs help.

I didn’t know what to expect before I started watching Behind Closed Doors. In spite of all the classic films and films noir that I have watched, I didn’t recognize any of the actors’ names until I did an online search, so I had little chance to make any assumptions. It was a great way to see Behind Locked Doors for the first time. The screenplay was well written; I found the story absorbing. The plot has some surprises, too, which I always count as a plus. I enjoyed the film a whole lot more than I thought I would.

Mischief (Book) (1950)

Mischief, by Charlotte Armstrong

In Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s, edited by Sarah Weinman

New York, NY: The Library of America, 2015

Mischief originally published in 1950

List of main characters:

Peter O. Jones

Ruth O. Jones

Bunny O. Jones, the Jones’s daughter

Eddie Munro, elevator operator at the Hotel Majestic

Nell Munro, Eddie’s niece

Jed Towers, hotel guest

Lyn Lesley

This story is really a novella: It’s only 133 pages long in the collection in which I found it. Mischief is the basis for the film noir Don’t Bother to Knock. I saw the film first and had high hopes for reading the novel. It does happen every once in a great while, however, that the film version hits all the right spots and the novel version doesn’t hit as many.

In this case, the screenwriter, Daniel Taradash, for Don’t Bother to Knock made all the right decisions in the changes made to Charlotte Armstrong’s story. I suspect that these decisions didn’t begin with Taradash; I imagine Marilyn Monroe, cast as Nell Forbes in the film (the character is Nell Munro in the novel), meant that turning the attention on her character was the real reason behind it all. It led to a better story on film.

Click here for my blog post about Don’t Bother to Knock, which I wrote for the Classic Movie Blog Association’s 2019 Spring Blogathon: Femmes/Hommes Fatale of Film Noir. You can still read all the entries for the blogathon by clicking here.

(This blog post about the novel Mischief contains spoilers about the novel and the film Don’t Bother to Knock.)

◊ The narrative in the novel starts with the Jones family, not with Lyn Lesley, as in the film version. The stories of the Joneses (Peter, Ruth, and their daughter Bunny); Nell Munro, Bunny’s babysitter; and Nell’s uncle Eddie Munro are intertwined from the beginning. Jed Towers is introduced from the beginning, but he is only a guest in the same hotel at that point. Lyn Lesley is introduced later, when Jed meets her for their date. It’s not clear until the end of Chapter 4 and all of Chapter 5 that Jed Towers and Lyn Lesley are part of the Jones/Munro story, too.

◊ The film version presents Nell much more sympathetically. She gets to tell her story of loss and grief to Jed Towers, who begins to feel some compassion for her in the film. Nell suffered a nervous breakdown after the death of her boyfriend Philip, and she tells Jed about the night that her boyfriend Philip was given up for lost at sea.

◊ In the novel, Nell is responsible for the accidental death of her parents in a fire she supposedly set while sleepwalking. The implication is that she might have gotten away with their murder.

◊ Nell attacks Bunny in both the novel and the film, and Bunny’s mother, Ruth Jones, interrupts her and fights her until Jed shows up. In the novel, Jed drags Nell, by grabbing her hair, off Ruth; in the film, Jed intervenes just enough to keep the two women from fighting any further and really hurting one another.

◊ In the novel, Jed is shot by the hotel detective while Jed is still holding on to Nell because Eva Ballew, another hotel guest, believes Nell’s story that Jed attacked her. Nell concocts this story in the film, too. It leads to a very brief hunt for Jed, but nothing comes of it once he joins the search for Nell.

◊ Nell is taken away by the hotel detective Perrin in the novel, not by the police. In the film, Nell is allowed to leave the hotel when she is ready, followed by the police officers.

◊ The novel ends in the Jones’s two adjoining hotel rooms, not in the hotel lobby, as it does in the film. In the novel, the characters are left alone and disillusioned after Nell is taken away.

◊ The film ends with a focus on Nell, Lyn, and Jed in the hotel lobby and some hope for the future. In the film, Jed vows to stand by Nell and help her in her recovery. His decision restores Lyn’s faith in the future of her relationship with Jed.

The shifts in the narrative in the film version allows the story to focus on Nell as a troubled character and on Lyn and Jed’s relationship. Viewers of the film have several characters to relate to. I found the characters in the novel to be much more distant and unlikable. Armstrong’s novel is well written: I have no problem with the technical aspects of the writing and the narrative. It did occur to me, however, that the brevity of the narrative is a plus because it was so difficult to spend time with the characters!

I enjoyed the film version (Don’t Bother to Knock) so much more. Lyn Lesley is a stronger character in the film. She is in control of her emotions and knows what she wants. Her relationship with Jed is on much more of an equal footing. In the film, both Jed and Nell are also much more sympathetic. Jed undergoes a transformation in the film, and he finally sees what Lyn means to him and how he can give her what she needs. Nell has a more sympathetic back story and she gets to tell it herself to Jed. She is treated more fairly by Jed and others around her because they (and the viewers) get to see her as a human being deserving of help rather than as a person to be taken away and locked up.

I can recommend the film Don’t Bother to Knock wholeheartedly, the novel not quite as much. Still, I am very glad I read it because it is the basis of the film. I found it fascinating how the narrative could be reshaped into something that I enjoyed more on film.