Someone Behind the Door

source: Someone Behind the Door

Enjoyed this film starring Charles Bronson,(The Stranger),"The Indian Runner",'91 who plays a man who has lost his memory and is treated at a hospital and taken home by Anothony Perkins,(Laurence Jeffries),"Edge of Sanity",'89. Laurence is a psychiatrist and decides to use this Stranger as an experiment and at the same time play games with his brain that seems to be empty of all personnel remembrance. Jill Ireland,(Francis Jeffries),"The Mechanic",'72 is a very attractive wife to Laurence Jeffries, but is neglected in the bedroom love making and has drifted a part from her husband. This is a rather interesting drama and suspense film, but rather slow paced.

Not special. not surprising. using Anthony Perkins for a role who seems be the most comfortable for him. remembering Hitchcock. and proposing the slow pace as basic tool for atmosphere. but it has a virtue who did it more than one of many thrillers from the "70. this virtue - Charles Bronson who propose a different hero, exotic for his career, vulnerable, passionate, fragile and innocent, part of dark plot , remembering a sort of Prince Myshkin. Bronson performance is the lead motif to see this film. and maybe, the last scene . short, a thriller who gives not exactly a credible story but one well made , respecting the rules of the genre.proposing a form of duel.

I saw this movie in 2018. Looking at the star cast of the movie charles Bronson & Anthony Perkins, I was quite excited about this movie. Since Bronson is my favorite action star from 70s & 80s. I love his death wish franchise & other action movies. And Perkins for his Psycho act as the main antagonist. But within half an hour my all excitement vanished. As the movie was becoming slow. And slow going movies often makes me feel bore of them. So after 45 to 50 mins i stopped watching this movie. I didn't saw the end or the climax of this movie. That's why i will not say much words about this movie. In all its a slow movie based on crime & thriller. I really can't say what the makers were thing while making this movie & what the message they wanted to give to its audience at that (70's) time. If u r a charles Bronson fan or a thriller movie fan u can watch this movie. Other wise i will not suggest any body for this movie even for a timepass also as it has got nothing much to offer you.

"Someone Behind the Door" is not bad but not great either. It still is better than most of Bronson's other films but this film is not recognized because it is so rare. I would never have found out about it if it weren't for accidently running across it in a video store. Charles Bronson plays an amnesia victim who is taken in by doctor Anthony Perkins. But Perkins has a plan to kill his wife so he convinces Bronson to murder her. "Someone Behind the Door" might disappoint some of Bronson's fans because it does not have the violence that is other films have.

Interesting psychological thriller. (I'd love to know what stage play it is based on.) The angst and drama don't quite hold up to the end but it is a nice ride getting there.

Someone Behind the Door is based on the French novel by Jacques Robert "Quelqu'un derriere la porte". In the novel the neurosurgeon (played by Anthony Perkins) is a writer and the Mystery Man 'behind the door'(Charles Bronson) is a fictitious character from the novel he's writing. The novel's fantasy world of writing became the movie's realistic and dramatic psychological duel between Perkins and Bronson.

**SPOILERS** Working his usual 16 hour shift at the hospital Dr. Laurence Jefferies, Anthony Perkins, spots a confused and discombobulated stranger played by Charles Bronson in the emergency ward and a light-bulb light up in his head. Laurence's sexy wife Frances, Jill Ireland, had been cheating on him and is about to leave for Paris to see her secret lover French journalist Paul Damien, Henri Garcin. With this stranger suffering from amnesia Laurence can now get his revenge without ever getting his hands dirty and ending up behind bars. The stranger wants to go home but doesn't quite know where home is and Laurence volunteers to drive him to the Bogston train station where he can get a train to London where the stranger strangely feels that he comes from. Found on East Cliff Beach the stranger has a nasty scratch on his chest as if he was being fought off by somebody, most properly a woman. Later in the movie we get a flashback, from the stranger, that he was involved in a rape and murder of a young woman on the beach. Laurence instead of taking the stranger to Bogston Station takes him back to his home and manically conditions his unbalanced and violent mind, with drugs that he slips into his orange juice, to murder his wife's Frances lover Paul but makes it as if Frances is really his, the stranger's, wife who cheating on him. Laurence is so obsessed in getting the stranger to murder Paul that he overlooks the fact that he had a gun on him, that Laurence found in the stranger's raincoat,that should have tipped him off how dangerous and violent he really is. Planting love letters from Paul, and a * photo of Frances on the stranger's clothes whacks out the stranger's mind. This tricked him into thinking that Frances is his wife, and gets him all riled up and crazy and more then willing to do in her lover Paul. Laurence also get's his brother in law Andrews, Adriano Magistretti, to get in touch, as a middle man, with Paul so he would come to England and talk his differences over with him in a clam and civilized way but in reality be confronted with the now mad and almost insane stranger. Laurence's plan works to perfection until the stranger and Paul meet at his front door, with him hiding like the coward that he is upstairs. It's then that something terribly goes wrong and the stranger balks. Instead of immediately shooting Paul Frances, who was unexpectedly with Paul outside in his car, Paul realizes that the stranger is not her husband at all but an impostor. Undoubtedly this was Charles Bronson's best acting but the movie "Someone Behind the Door" is far from his best movie with a totally unbelievably story-line that doesn't give his acting any credit. Anthony Perkins is so weird that I pity the patients that he's attending back at the hospital, or in his doctor's office, if you consider Charles Bronson, the stranger, as a prime example of his "top notch" medical work. Jill Ireland is by far the most believable, with her lover Henri Garcin playing Paul a close second, of the actors in the movie with her shock and total confusion at the end of the movie when she meets her "husband" the stranger Charles Bronson, even though he's her husband in real life. The wild and furious fight that they have is inter-cut with the stranger's rape and murder of the young woman that caused his amnesia was by far the highlight of the movie.

A slow moving thriller with no thrills, suspense or logic to it. Anthony Perkins turns in an unconvincing performance as a brain surgeon and criminal mastermind. Charles Bronson, playing an amnesia victim, spends the whole time looking lost and confused; Maybe he thought he was part of the audience. Jill Ireland looks good but shows no real talent for acting. The lack of a tense background score (Instead, a movement from Dvorak's "New World Symphony" plays on a record player) makes the proceedings seem even more dry and lifeless. The tedium goes on far too long, with scant reward for those viewers who make it to the end. Cannot recommend this film.

Sadly after watching this thriller, based on the French novel by Jacques Robert "Quelqu'un derriere la porte", I can only say that it didn't stand the time. It's very slowly and has nothing to offer. To make it even worse Anthony Perkins isn't really great here and Jill Ireland is only for a few moments in it. Even Charles Bronson, an actor I do like didn't gave his best performance here. To make it even worse the version I saw was out of sync and had a lot of drops and hiss on the sound. Not even that, it also had a few reels with the wrong colour temperature. It was on official DVD but looked clearly as a VHS rip of bad quality. Anthony tries to give a creepy performance as in Psycho (1960) as doctor Laurence Jeffries who has bad things in his mind with the amnesiac unknown man (Charles Bronson) to make him believe that his wife Frances Jeffries (Jill Ireland) is in fact the unknown man's wife and is cheating on him so she has to die. But Anthony somehow just can't give us a creepy or even believable performance. Charles Bronson is okay but he was here in a period that he wasn't really cast in blockbusters. He just came from Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) and was casted as a man with few words but much action. Here he has a lot of words and no action and you can see that it wasn't his thing. He was casted in European flicks but after this one he went back with his wife Jill Ireland to US soil to make a few hard-edged crime and western dramas starting from 1972. Of course the big break through came in 1974 together with his wife in the controversial revenge flick Death Wish. The audience couldn't get enough of tough guy Bronson while his flicks became more and more violent. He was a late bloomer in Hollywood but what an actor he became. Someone Behind The Door has a title that is never explained and isn't one of the three main actors (Perkins, Ireland, Bronson) most famous flick. Gore 0/5 Nudity 0,5/5 Effects 0/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5