The movie unfolds like a play. Laurence Jeffries (Anthony Perkins), a doctor specializing in memory loss, is working third shift at a hospital in the south of England. A fisherman brings in a disoriented patient (Bronson) he found wandering a nearby beach, apparently suffering from amnesia. Clearly up to no good, Jeffries dismisses the patient as merely intoxicated, telling his co-workers that he's going to give the stranger a ride to the train station on his way home. In fact Jeffries takes him back to his house for reasons initially unclear.

The doctor's purpose in "treating" the stranger's amnesia in secrecy and the stranger's identity are gradually revealed like layers of an onion. Without giving anything away, it soon becomes apparent that the stranger may have killed someone near where he was first found, and that Jeffries is manipulating the man into committing some sort of act of revenge against the doctor's unfaithful wife, Frances (Jill Ireland, Bronson's real-life wife and frequent co-star).

(Mild Spoilers) An Italian-French co-production filmed in England, Someone Behind the Door (released in France as Quelqu'un derriere la porte) operates from an interesting but basically absurd conceit, that Jeffries, unable or unwilling to kill his wife's lover, Paul (Belgian Henri Garcin, The Eighth Day), feeds The Stranger (as Bronson's character is billed) Jeffries' own repressed rage and identity, slipping in little pieces of his own identity: a nude snapshot of Frances, a faked diary, etc., so that the man will come to believe that he's essentially the person he's in fact talking to (shades of Man without a Body!).

Jeffries' scheme is extravagantly improbable, with a "personality transplant" bordering on science fiction and begging endless questions: Even if Jeffries can convince the stranger to murder his wife's lover, then what? What will happen when Paul explains that Frances isn't dead at all, but alive and well? What happens after the police question the stranger about his motives?

Wild improbabilities aside, other aspects of the film are unusually well done, anticipating in some respects director co-writer Nicolas Gessner's later and far superior The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976). Though Jeffries' ultimate aim is absurd, his manipulation of the stranger is fascinating and almost believable. Anthony Perkins had played variations of this type of character ever since Psycho (1960), but he's fine here. (A brief scene where he lies to police inquiring about the stranger's whereabouts recalls Perkins' dialogue with Martin Balsam in Hitchcock's film.)

In an atypical role, Charles Bronson is especially good as the vulnerable amnesiac. He's excellent early on, appearing genuinely disoriented and in a state of quiet panic. Later, Jeffries' machinations make him edgy and the madness the doctor unleashes within him is frighteningly real; that his paranoia about his "wife's" infidelity is entirely imagined makes it all the more disturbing. Bronson almost never got credit for his acting; after all those Death Wish sequels critics made fun of his disinterested, cigar store Indian inexpressiveness, but when the character challenged him, as this clearly did, he'd usually hit a home run: though the film is below average overall, Bronson gives one of his best performances. Perhaps inspired by her husband's work, even Jill Ireland, often quite bad in their films together, is very good in her smaller role.

(Despite some nudity, violent rape and murder, in those wacky early days of the MPAA ratings system, Someone Behind the Door snagged a GP rating, the forerunner to PG. Lionsgate was apparently too cheap to get the film re-rated, and the DVD box lists this GP rating, certain to confuse viewers too young to remember the MPAA's older rating system.)

Video & Audio

Despite claims of 16:9 enhancement, Someone Behind the Door is quite annoyingly presented in a 4:3 letterboxed transfer at 1.77:1, approximating its original 1.66:1 release. The image is quite good otherwise, presumably miles ahead of earlier PD incarnations, but didn't anyone at Lionsgate (or DVD production company Cloud Nineteen) bother to check it? Less annoying but similarly sloppy is the fact that the film's inserts - close-ups of the faked diary entries, for example - are culled from the French release and thus incongruously in French, needlessly confusing matters about the stranger's identity. Inserts created for the English version may be lost, but if that's the case Lionsgate should have created English subtitles for such cutaways, as indie labels like Blue Underground and NoShame routinely do.

The 2.0 Dolby Digital mono is okay. No other language or subtitle options are given, though the film is closed captioned. The menu screen is limited to "Play Movie" and "Scene Selection," yet Lionsgate boldly lists this and the non-existent 16:9 transfer among six special features. It's too bad they didn't think to add "Play Movie" as one of the extras.

Parting Thoughts

Bronson fans expecting a hard-core action-thriller will be enormously disappointed by Someone Behind the Door's low-key intelligence and confined staging, while the film's unlikely plotting work against some good acting and fitfully effective psychological thriller elements.

Film historian Stuart Galbraith IV's most recent essays appear in Criterion's new three-disc Seven Samurai DVD and BCI Eclipse's The Quiet Duel.