Behind the Door by Morris, Reed and Willat

Well, here's a bit of a departure. A silent film... And if you think silent films were naive, or tame, just listen to this brief synopsis. 

The place is America. The time is the First World War. Oscar Krug (Hobart Bosworth) is a retired mariner turned taxidermist. When America enters the war, he signs up as a captain in the navy.

His young bride Alice Morse (Jane Novak) stows away on his ship. They are torpedoed and  Oscar and Alice end up adrift in a lifeboat. They think they are rescued when a submarine surfaces.

But it's a German U-boat, commanded by the evil Lieutenant Brandt (Wallace Beery). 

The Germans kidnap Alice and leave Oscar adrift to die. 

Alice is horrifically abused, killed and her body fired out the torpedo tube of the submarine.

But Oscar doesn't die. He ends up as the captain of another ship. One which sinks Brandt's U-boat. Brandt has no idea who Oscar is, and accepts his hospitality in the captain's cabin as Oscar gets him drunk and prepares for his vengeance.

Which is where Oscar's taxidermy skills come in...

Behind the Door is renowned as the most horrifying movie of the silent era, and it still packs a tremendous punch. Both the assault on Jane and Oscar's excoriating revenge on Brandt take place behind closed doors. But the film is all the more powerful for leaving the details to our imagination.

The movie is based on a story by Gouverneur Morris (the credit's read "the Gouverneur Morris Superdrama") which was originally published in McClure's Magazine. 

Morris was paid $10,000 for the screen rights — about $180,000 in today's money. The magazine story appeared in July 1918 and the film was being shot a year later.

It was adapted for the screen by Luther Reed, who also worked on Howard Hughes' blockbuster Hell's Angels. It was Reed who added the torpedo tube disposal of poor Alice.
 
The director was Irvin Willat. The marvellous Flicker Alley Blu-ray I watched features a lot of details about Willat, who was a colourful fellow, to say the least. 

Both bigoted and eccentric, the two facts about Willat that stick in my mind is that he was anti-smoking fifty years before it became fashionable, and that he was accused of selling his wife to Howard Hughes...


Behind the Door is beautifully made, with gorgeous tints and tones (one evening shot is blue with a pink background) and it features a really impressive fight scene at the beginning.

So it's all the more fascinating to watch the interview with silent film expert Kevin Brownlow in which he declares that both the tinting and the fight are considerably inferior to other silent classics of the period...

There is something uniquely magical about silent films, and I have a yearning to explore them further. So don't be surprised if you read more posts on the subject... and if anybody has any titles to recommend, please get in touch!

(Image credits: The cover of the Blu-Ray/DVD is from Flicker Alley's website. The McClure's Magazine cover is from Flickr (no relation). The tinted images are from an excellent review by Gary Tooze on DVD Beaver.)