Behind the Door (Thomas H. Ince Productions, Artcraft, Paramount, 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched an intriguing movie on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” that I’d never heard of before: Behind the Door, a 1919 production by Thomas H. Ince, released through Paramount on their high-end “Artcraft” label. Ince is one of the more forgotten figures in silent-film industry even though it was he, more than anyone else, who invented the studio system. He actually built the studio complex that later became the headquarters of MGM for many years (and is now owned by Sony) and, though he directed several pictures personally (notably Civilization, an ill-timed 1916 anti-war epic that was compared to D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance and was likewise a box-office flop), he was mainly known as a producer and studio head. In 1915 he, D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett merged their companies to form the short-lived Triangle Studios, but by 1919 Triangle was moribund and Ince, who’d pioneered the studio system, with this production also pioneered the sort of arrangement that would succeed it: an independent producer teaming up with a major studio and recruiting a writer, director and cast to offer the project to a studio that would finance and release it.

Behind the Door was released in early 1919, just after World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before World War II) ended, and it stars former stage actor Hobart Bosworth as Oscar Krug, who runs a taxidermy store in a small Massachusetts town. (The idea that in 1919 there was enough of a demand for stuffed animals a taxidermy business could maintain a store on a small-town main street is itself an interesting sign of how much the culture has shifted.) The film actually begins in 1925 -- six years after it was made, a rare example of a film set in the near future that isn’t science fiction -- in which Krug returns to his taxidermy shop, long since closed, abandoned and regularly vandalized by street kids. Then the film flashes back to 1917, when Krug’s reasonably successful career and his attempt to marry Alice Morse (Jane Novak), daughter of the town’s richest man, Matthew Morse (J. P. Lockney) -- which her dad naturally opposes -- are both derailed by the U.S. declaration of war against Germany. A group of townspeople gather around Krug’s shop, intent on either beating him up or outright lynching him for having a German name and ancestry and daring him to enlist in the war against his ancestral homeland. Krug protests that he was part of Admiral George Dewey’s fleet in Manila Bay in the Spanish-American War, and so when he does enlist he’s steered not to the Army but to the Navy.

TCM host Jacqueline Stewart (a statuesque Black woman with hair either very short or severely pulled back, who seems to have been hired mainly because TCM wants to get across the idea that classic movie buffs come in all colors and genders) said the film might have done better at the box office if it had been released while the war was still going on. But I suspect it wouldn’t have had much of a chance before the war given its out-front critique of the insane level of anti-German jingoism that got ratcheted up in 1917 and led to such absurdities as the venerable conductor of the Boston Symphony, Karl Muck, being interned for eight months as an enemy alien. (He left the U.S. after his release and not surprisingly never came here again, though he continued to live and work in Europe until his death in 1930.) The film was directed by a person with whom I have a personal connection: Irvin Willat, a filmmaker who specialized in stories about the sea; my connection to him is I went to high school with his grand-nephew Carl Willat, a cartoonist with my high-school paper with a wicked imagination and great sense of humor. Willat directed the second feature in two-strip Technicolor, Wanderer of the Wasteland (1924), but I’d never actually seen a film of his until last night -- and he’s not a particularly interesting or creative director but he stages the action effectively and the film picks up considerably once Krug actually goes out to sea on a ship called the Perth.

We learn it’s supposed to sail escorted by a British destroyer but we never find out what kind of ship the Perth is or how it figures in the war effort. Not that it matters much, because it’s only six days out to sea when it’s sunk by a German U-boat whose captain is listed only as “Submarine Commander” on the official credits but as “Lt. Brandt” on imdb.com. He’s played by the young Wallace Beery, already easily recognizable as the character actor (usually, but not always, a villain) who stayed at MGM for decades, and though part of me wished for Erich von Stroheim in this role Beery acquitted himself well enough in a film whose acting was quite variable. Bosworth tried to tone down his stage-bred gestores for film but didn’t always succeed, and J. P. Lockney’s performance is almost a caricature of silent-film acting at its hammy worst. The gimmick is that Krug married Alice on the eve of his departure on the Perth, her dad threw her out of his home, and with nowhere else to go she stowed away on the Perth -- only when the ship is sunk Brandt’s U-boat encounters the lifeboat in which Krug and Alice are floating aimlessly at sea (“without sail or oar,” the title tells us) and takes her aboard but leaves him on the sea to die.

He’s eventually picked up (we don’t say by whom or how, but almost certainly by a U.S. or allied vessel) and he ends up the captain of another ship, which sinks the U-98 and takes Brandt and several other crew members on board as prisoners. There’s a chilling scene in which Krug takes personal charge of Brandt, reveals himself as a fellow German (we know this because a title reads “Deutschland Uber Alles”), gets the guy drunk and gets him to talk about “mermaids” he’s found at sea -- really stranded women he could kidnap and take aboard as sex slaves for himself and his crew. Willat’s direction, relatively unadventurous in the early scenes (there are almost no moving-camera shots or the kind of quick intercutting Griffith pioneered), suddenly becomes chilling as we see flashbacks showing exactly what happened to Alice aboard the U-98: she became Lt. Brandt’s sex slaves and then, when he was finished with her, he threw her to his crew who descended on her like locusts on a cornfield. When she died from these ministrations, they simply dumped her at sea by firing her body through one of the torpedo tubes.

Flash-forward back to the ship where Krug is holding Brandt as a prisoner and has insisted on taking personal charge of him; other crew members, including Krug’s first mate and friend McTavish (James Gordon), hear odd noises from Krug’s cabin but ignore them. We got an intimation of what Krug intends to do with Brandt when we see him break out his old taxidermy tool kit and extract a scalpel, and eventually Krug invites McTavish and a fellow crew member to look “behind the door” where he’s strung up Brandt and .. Willat politely averts his camera but we read a couple of titles in which Krug says, “I promised to skin him alive … but he died before I could finish.” The ending takes place in 1925 and shows Krug inside his old and long-abandoned taxidermy shop, where his dead wife reappears as a ghostly image; as Krug dies his own ghostly image emerges from his body and he and Alice are reunited in death like 19th century opera characters.

Behind the Door was based on what was billed as a “spectacular story” by Gouverneur Morris -- who actually gets his name in bigger letters than the director’s (a Writers’ Guild of America member’s wet dream!) -- though the actual script was by Luther Reed (who later became a director and specialized in World War I movies) -- and Behind the Door emerges as a quite capable film even though it’s hardly one of the deathless greats of the silent era. It’s also one of those films in which no one print survived complete: it had to be pieced together from an incomplete (and, in spots, badly nitrate-burned) print from the Library of Congress, a complete but heavily abridged version released in Russia and discovered in a film archive there, along with a few scenes that had to be filled in with stills and an elaborate color-tinting scheme reproduced from Willat’s surviving cutting continuity for the film. The opening features a spectacular effect that combines tinting and toning to show a bright red sunrise over a blue-tinted background until the entire screen fills with red representing the dawn; many silent films were quite elaborately tinted, and it shows that many silent-era filmmakers regarded the absence of color as a limitation they were eager to work around as much as possible -- while 1930’s and 1940’s filmmakers often liked the starkness of black-and-white and were not thrilled by color even when photographic color processes became available.