Review: The Strange Door (1951)

Charles Laughton steals the show in this 1951 gothic chamber drama that drips with atmosphere--and occasionally even blood. The Strange Door owes its origins to a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped. The tale was originally serialized in a magazine but was finally collected in book form (New Arabian Nights) in 1882 with some of Stevenson's other great tales. Given our author's affection for rogues, pirates, and swordplay, the swashbuckling elements should come as no surprise. But this movie succeeds at straddling the line between multiple genres: it's part horror, part swashbuckler, part chamber drama, part love story, part revenge plot--a la The Count of Monte Cristo or even The Man in the Iron Mask. The gothic element owes to the fact that much of the story centers around a house in decline. Above stands a beautiful estate that entertains the wealthy, but below lies a dungeon complete with torture devices, tended by a lumbering brute played by the ever-sympathetic Boris Karloff. 

Richard Stapley, who had appeared just a few years prior in 1948's updating of The Three Musketeers with Gene Kelly and Lana Turner, plays a scoundrel prone to bad decisions. After a tavern confrontation ends in violence that results in his pursuit, he legs it into the countryside where he finds refuge behind a looming steel door--you guessed it, the very one from the title. Inside he finds himself the prisoner of Charles Laughton, who has zero qualms about stealing the movie from every one of his co-stars. As it turns out, Stapley's arrival at this estate is no coincidence; he has been chosen. What follows is a tale of burning revenge complete with elaborate deathtraps that would make Jigsaw proud. Sally Forrest plays Laughton's niece, an innocent caught in his dark web. Character actor buffs should also keep an eye out for Alan Napier, who would play Alfred to Adam West's Bruce Wayne some 15 years later on TV's Batman. 

Laughton is a hissable villain who is wildly over the top, but somehow it works. He chews the scenery, yawns his way through dialogue, and lazily stretches and lounges against furniture in a cat-like way that I've rarely seen in movies from this era. Perhaps he was so amused by the massive paycheck he received for this role that he couldn't hide his delight? In reality, what we witness is a stagey performance by a master thespian who had cut his teeth in front of a live audience. While many of the stars of the Golden Age also worked in theater, few of them feel quite as "theatrical" as Laughton. He seems to be having the time of his life and one need not imagine director Joseph Pevney needing to tell his star to "play it a little bigger." Karloff, on the other hand, is the polar opposite; he embodies a simplicity that immediately puts us on his side, and our loyalty to him is still not tested as he kills roughly half-a-dozen people with either his bare hands or a knife. We're always rooting for him. 

The Strange Door just feels different. It's a Universal-International picture, so it's a more ambitious production than the lower-budget fare that Universal built their early success upon during the studio's formative years, but it also feels like a throwback to those glory days of Frankenstein and Dracula and The Black Cat. The actual truth is that this was a deliberate effort by Universal-International to get back into horror after stepping away from the genre for several years during the latter half of the 1940s. To attempt this, the studio produced two major efforts in the early1950s: this film and 1952's The Black Castle. Considering that the screenwriter of both films, Jerry Sackheim, had been working at the studio during the 1930s, he certainly knew what was expected of him and delivers it in spades. Furthermore, one need only look at the movie's original marketing materials, including the poster and lobby cards, to see how much Universal wanted the public to connect this movie to their horror legacy. 

The gothic atmosphere I've mentioned several times now manifests itself not just thematically, but also visually. One scene in the third act takes place in a cemetery filled with crosses with a statue of a crucified Christ towering over the graves. All of this is set in deep blacks and shadows, the presence of death palpable. The climax of the film takes place in a chamber with walls that close in on both sides, crushing anyone inside. The film's finale is surprisingly gruesome for an era when the production code was still being enforced with a heavy hand. 

The Strange Door was a part of later "Shock Theater" packages that were syndicated in various American markets in the 1960s. It was viewed favorably upon its initial release and even seems to have garnered a respectable reputation over the years, but for some reason--perhaps how late it comes in the cycle of Universal horror--it seems to be regarded now as more of a curiosity than a classic. Nevertheless, I think it's a spectacular example of Universal's darker fare--the kind of movie that had built the studio's reputation twenty years earlier.