Karina: Interior, Universal Studio soundstage, day. It's the spring of 1947 and shooting has come to a standstill on the set of "Secret Beyond the Door." Fritz Lang sits in his director's chair. Joan Bennett stands opposite him, her arms crossed over her chest. A tense script conference ensues as the crew waits.

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "But don't you think we could use stunt doubles? Michael is awfully nervous as it is. I mean, this is a real burning fire."

Fritz Lang [Reenactment]: "No, you two must do it. You will show us how it feels to run for your lives. From a house, smoldering like your burning laugh."

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "It would be a hell of a lot easier Fritz if you just let me smolder for my co-star instead."

Fritz Lang [Reenactment]: "Enough discussion."

Karina: Cut to interior "Secret Beyond the Door" set. Fire. Joan clings to her co-star Michael Redgrave. They carefully rushed through the burning walls of the set with flames leaping out all around them. Close up on Joan's face as she flashes back to interior, Joan Bennett's Holmby Hills mansion. Day. Mother's day, 1943. Another moment of crisis. Joan wakes in her plush bed and smells the smoke. She jumps into practical action, herding her children and staff downstairs and outside. Calmly, she picks up the phone from the kitchen wall and calls the fire department. Exterior Holmby Hills mansion, front lawn moments later. Joan Bennett's eyes water as she watches her dream house burn. Now that it's clear that everyone is out of physical danger, her facade cracks, she collapses in tears. We cut back to the soundstage as crew members douse the burning facade. Joan, visibly shaken, approaches a triumphant Fritz. 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "You knew how traumatic it was for me to relive my house burning and you put me through it anyway. I hope you've got what you wanted."

Karina: The camera holds on the amused director as the actress makes her exit resolved that Fritz Lang's power over her ends today.

In our last episode, we talked about Fritz Lang and Joan Bennett's crucial role in fomenting, the genre of film noir with their 1944 moral thriller "The Woman in the Window." So "Woman in the Window" would foretell several cultural shifts that would all blossom in the years immediately after World War II. With men returning to the home front, women were pushed out of the jobs and positions of relative power they had acquired during war time, and expected to return to their pre-war largely domestic roles. At the same time, the movies began to re-embrace male spectators by appealing to their post-war trauma and their anxieties about reintegrating into an American society, in which women had proven themselves self-sufficient while the men had been gone. As we'll see the noirs to follow in the next few years would reflect a very different collective unconscious. One permanently marked both by these gender tensions and by a war victory that came at an incredible moral cost. As noir exploded, Lang and Bennett thrive. In 1945, the actress and director would start a production company in partnership with Joan's husband producer, Walter Wanger called Diana Productions. The company was named after Joan's, eldest daughter, but the name evokes the Roman goddess, who amongst other things was the guardian of crossroads who guided souls into the underworld. This seems fitting, given that across the two films that Diana managed to produce before the partnership went sour, Joan, Walter and Fritz Lang approached a cultural crossroads together, and by all accounts, its last phase turned out to be a journey into hell. Joan and Walter would hit the peak of their careers in 1945 with the first Diana production, "Scarlet Street". But from that peak, unbeknownst to them at the time, there was nowhere to go, but down. I'm Karina Longworth.

Vanessa: I'm Vanessa Hope. This is part three of Love is a Crime.

Karina: Going into the formation of Diana, Walter Wanger was on a hot streak. Throughout the war, he had a deal with Universal Studios that allowed him to work independently and still make films bankrolled by the studio and released through their distribution apparatus. By 1945, Universal was so confident in Wanger's skills as a hitmaker, especially in combination with Joan and Fritz whose previous collaborations had been cash cows, that they allowed him to set up Diana as a second production shingle on the Universal lot, which was not Joan's favorite place to be.

Ronald Davis: You remember anything much much about the Universal lot?

Joan Bennett: I wasn't crazy about it. As I recall, I kind of dumpy compared to 20th Century, or Paramount, which were, and Metro, which were all very nice, but the Universal was just the dressing rooms were'nt nice. And that the whole lot was kinda dumpy. 

Karina: But Joan was truly the key to the collaboration. She served as the glue that temporarily bonded together Wanger and Lang, two men who had little in common besides for their faith in Joan. And in forming a production company with Lang both Joan and Walter were acknowledging that he had become Joan's ideal director, and the best guide of her career. In her 1985 oral history with Ronald Davis, Joan's answers about most directors were virtually monosyllabic, but she held on to strong feelings about Fritz Lang and somewhat surprisingly, they were generally positive. 

Ronald Davis: Uh, Fritz Lang we come to.

Joan Bennett: He was a marvelous direcor. 

Ronald Davis: Was he? 

Joan Bennett: And nobody got on with him, I did.

Ronald Davis: Yes, I've heard he was a very, could be a very tough man. 

Joan Bennett: But I got on beautifully with him. 

Ronald Davis: How would you describe him? What was he like as a person? 

Joan Bennett: He was very brash and very definite about what he wanted and if it wasn't done exactly the way he wanted it, he sort of laid down the actor that wasn't doing it. But I think he was just a great director, and as I say, we got along beautifully, but everybody had targets and they can't stand it. 

Ronald Davis: What would you say, uh, Lang's strength as a director were? 

Joan Bennett: Well, like knowing what he wanted, which I thought was the right thing and insisted on getting it. 

Karina: But why would Fritz Lang choose to hitch his fortunes to Joan Bennett and her husband? Some who knew Lang believed he was in love with Joan. Others believe the attraction was mutual. The idea that Fritz Lang and Joan Bennett could have been lovers has inspired passionate rumination from the philosopher Slavo Zizek who once wrote of his formative attraction to Joan and described an obsession with the question, did Lang do it with her or not? In his biography of Fritz Lang, Patrick McGilligan quotes a number of sources who speculate that Lang did. But no one seems to know for sure. Vanessa doesn't buy it. 

Vanessa: I'm going to venture that my grandmother, Joan, did not have an affair with Fritz Lang. She was under contract with 20th Century Fox when she got the part in "Manhunt," which was her first film with him, and so it's not like she needed to lure him like a femme fatale would in order to work with him to begin with. And then they had such a successful working relationship on that movie that they continued and "Scarlet Street" and "The Woman in the Window" were also huge successes for them. I don't think there was any kind of need.

They might've been drawn to each other and they might've had a flirtatious relationship, but I think that was just to smooth the wheels because I think Fritz was pretty prickly and difficult. Then there's the question of was Joan unhappy enough in her marriage. That she would have needed or been vulnerable to the attentions of another man. And I don't think that was the case either. I think it was still early in her marriage with my grandfather, Walter, and they were pretty happy and both of them were doing pretty well financially and with their movies. So, no, I think a straight up working relationship was what it was, and an affair would have been a whole other kettle of fish.

Karina: McGilligan quotes Lang's secretary, Hilda Rolfe who speculates that Lang only continued a working relationship with Joan because he may have been sleeping with her. "If they were lovers, Rolfe said, quote, "then I understand why he used her because he didn't think she was a good actress. He would make negative cracks about her all the time around the office."

Vanessa: I think that's not fair. Their working relationship was legit. She had the credits, he had the credits. I think it's misogyny to suggest that he would only work with her if he was sleeping with her or there was no other reason for them to be having such a good working relationship. Jesus, that's not fair. 

Karina: In her autobiography, Joan compared Fritz Lang to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Joan suggested that she and Lang worked so well together because she learned to give as good as she got. Advising a younger actress who was having trouble with the director, Joan said, 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "Do you know how I used to greet him loud and clear every morning while we were shooting? 'Good morning, Fritz you old son of a bitch.' Right in front of everybody that took the wind out of the sails and everything went swimmingly afterward. You've got to get it in first if you know what I mean." 

Karina: This barbed chemistry may have been attractive to Fritz, but the real lure for him in the Diana partnership was represented by the fact that Wanger had set Diana up so that Lang would enjoy unprecedented power at very little personal risk. Lang became Diana's single majority shareholder with the title of president two Wanger's vice-president. Wanger's generosity came from his read on Fritz Lang's psychology. 

Walter Wanger [Reenactment]: "This was the only way to build the man up so that he wouldn't have this inferiority complex and be so difficult. The idea was that if people once showed confidence in him, he would be very easy to handle. After seeing how the executives treated him at Fox, Joan believed poor Fritz Lang was an abused soul, and if he only had a company of his own, where he could get a chance to express himself it would make a new man of him and remove all his inhibitions."

Karina: In short, Diana productions was the DBA handle for a triangle that had a complicated relationship based on art money, sex and celebrity. "Scarlet Street," the trio's first film together would be a masterpiece cautionary tale about, you guessed it, art, money, sex, and celebrity

Edward G. Robinson [Acting]: "Look Kitty, if I were single, if I had no wife," 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "But you have a wife" 

Edward G. Robinson [Acting]: "Yes, I know, but if she did- well, if something would happen, that would make me free would you marry me?" 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Let's not talk about it now dear when I'm worried about getting a job, living like this it's expensive. I don't like to ask you for anything more because I haven't sold any pictures lately."

Edward G. Robinson [Acting]: "Yes but, don't you have enough money?"

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "No, you have no idea what a problem money is for an actress, Chris. Countless and countless yet everything is poor. Contacts, knowing the right people. You have to get an agent. They charge plenty.

Vanessa: It feels almost like a follow-up to "The Woman in the Window", because again, it stars Joan and Edward G. Robinson, and she's the femme fatale, and he's kind of the middle-class victim at first. "Scarlet Street" was based on a book and another movie directed by Jean Renoir. That book and movie were called, "La Chienne," the bitch in French. And they didn't call this remake, the bitch, which I'm happy about. So, Edward G. Robinson is unhappily, married and paints in his spare time. When he first meets Joan, it's a dark and rainy night in Greenwich Village. He's just finished with a business meeting and it ran late. He sees this woman across the way who's in a fight. She's being beaten up by a man who he assumes as a stranger and he goes over and rescues and she sort of plays like she needs a rescue, and she can tell he would be put off if he knew she was actually a prostitute. So she pretends, she's an actress. She's pretty wily. 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Come on, let's get out of here." 

Edward G. Robinson [Acting]: "Do we have to wait for the officer?"

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "I don't want to get my name in the newspaper. Do you?" 

Edward G. Robinson [Acting]: "The newspaper?" 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Sure, we'll have to go down to the station house and make a complaint and every time they make an arrest they send detectives to your house for weeks. Oh, it's a nuisance. Won't you take me home?"

Edward G. Robinson [Acting]: "Well, if you think that, that..." 

Karina: Joan's character, Kitty manipulates Robinson's Chris into renting an apartment for her on the rationale that he can use it as his painting studio. Eventually Kitty starts taking credit for Chris' paintings and becomes something of an art star. When her sugar daddy isn't around, she uses the pad to entertain her real boyfriend, . The man we saw beating her up in her first scene. 

Vanessa: Joan's character in this movie is very sexually brazen for the time. The fact that she enjoys sex with her boyfriend is shocking. And unfortunately he likes to beat her up, pimps her out, exploits her, he steals from her and she still loves him. And in the end, when Edward G. Robinson is driven crazy by the fact that she is not in love with him and never will be, and is not an artist and never will be and loves this guy Johnny, and mocks Edward G. Robinson over the fact that he thinks she could possibly be in love with him and he stabs her to death in her bed- he's forever haunted by this stabbing because he doesn't have to go to jail for it. The boyfriend, Johnny, who was obviously violent, ends up taking the rap and going to prison. And so Chris is just haunted by the idea that Johnny and Kitty will always be in love and he will always be on the outside. It's a dark one. It's a good one. It's not a dream at the end of this one, you can't just wake up and erase the whole past. 

Karina: "Scarlet Street" was shot during the summer and fall of 1945 as World War II was coming to an end. It was a summer of ecstatic celebration for many in the US, but Fritz Lang was pessimistic. As he told a reporter,

Fritz Lang [Reenactment]: "I thought that on V-E day I would feel very happy, but when it came, I could not rejoice for Roosevelt should have left more state and V-E was an incident, not an ending. And now we are knowing what must come. I tried, I tried so hard to convince people you must kill 5 million Germans. I told them, but they said you have been too close to it Fritz, you are bitter. Now they see in the newsreels and they know." 

Karina: Fritz Lang was the canary in the coal mine. When the immediate post-war flush of elation ended, the reckoning began, and for many, there was disillusionment waiting in the attempted return to normalcy. This is what film noir at its core reflected. It was the product of a nation that had become historically wealthy and powerful after inflicting unprecedented, apocalyptic violence. Few film noir actually directly addressed nuclear guilt, at least not until the cold war intensified, but the feelings of regret and paranoia and the culture shock of returning to so-called normal life as though everything including gender roles, hadn't been totally up ended for years, infused movies like "Scarlet Street," which were ostensibly about romantic obsession. Lang had also infused "Scarlet Street" with aspects of himself that had nothing to do with the war, such as his feelings of inadequacy as an artist, but this was still a work for hire, and after six months of working on the movie, Lang salary ran out. Rather than stay and continue the editing process, Lang walked away from "Scarlet Street" in order to take a new job. So Walter took over the process of delivering a final cut. 

Matthew Bernstein: It was quite unusual for Walter Wanger to cut a director's film personally, 

Karina: This is Walter's biographer, Matthew Bernstein. 

Matthew Bernstein: He was a very kind of hands-off producer and he usually let a director have their way with the material. Give them final cut, and if Lang had been on the Universal lot at the end of the post-production with "Scarlet Street", Walter wouldn't have been able to make any cuts cause Lang watched his material very carefully, but Lang had cut the film and actually left the Universal lot to work on his next film, which was "Cloak and Dagger" and that was being shot at Warner Brothers. The fact that he even left the Universal lot to make another film upset Walter. So after Fritz Lang finished work on "Scarlet Street", Wanger got feedback from Universal's sales staff who felt the film was over long and needed to be shortened. 

Karina: When Lang saw Wanger's cut, he was livid that the producer had deviated from the director's vision. He felt betrayed that Walter had seated to the studio's demands instead of protecting Lang. 

Matthew Bernstein: I think the cuts were great they made the film better, but you know, they sort of had this understanding. I mean, Diana Productions was created to give Fritz Lang maximum creative freedom in Hollywood, which he hadn't had since he arrived in the early thirties and which he enjoyed at UFA back in Germany. So it's understandable, but at the same time, Fritz Lang was a very particular kind of personality. He was very demanding. He was very self-defensive. He could be very arrogant. So I agree. Fritz had reason to be upset with Walter about it, but if he been a different kind of person, he would have let it go and move on.

Karina: The cuts Walter made to "Scarlet Street" were designed to make it more commercial. This was an area in which the illusion of sex was something movie studios had learned how to sell usually without crossing a line that would lead to censorship. In the mid 1940s, many producers played an elaborate shell game to get away with promising ticket buyers of veneer of sex and sin while also conforming to the extremely moralistic censorship production code.

Before a Hollywood film could be released the production code administration had to give the film its seal of approval, but many states and major cities also had their own censorship boards, which could request further edits in order to allow a film to be shown in their jurisdiction. 

Vanessa: The principal obstacles for the sensors with "Scarlet Street" were Joan's characters lewd relationship with Dan Duryea's character, where she enjoys sex or appears to enjoy the seduction, and he enjoys being sadistic toward her. He's quite violent and exploitative, and the fact that Edward G Robinson's character who murders Joan's character in the end is never brought to justice for the murder. So the production code passed the film and even the Catholic Legion of Decency let it slip by with a B rating, meaning objectionable in part, but the New York State Board of Censors refused to give the film a license and denounced it as immoral, indecent, corrupt, and intending to incite crime. This was something I know Walter protested against saying that Joan is a mother of three children. She would not be in a movie that was meant to incite crime or delinquency. And then, despite all of this behind the scenes drama, the film did really well at the box office, both in the US and abroad. 

Karina: Walter personally dealt with each local censor individually. Traveling from city to city to work out deals. He appeased the New York censors by cutting the film's climactic murder scene. So that seven stabbing motions were shaved down to one. Other cities tried to ban "Scarlet Street" outright, but Wanger successfully fought the city of Atlanta in the courts. All of "Scarlet Street"s, censorship issues created headlines, which helped drive business to the film in the cities where it was screened freely. The film success increased Joan's sense of stability. In her career, and in her home life, things were better than they had ever been. What she didn't know was that this was pretty much as good as it was ever going to get. 

Vanessa: I mean, we never know we're at our own peak and that's a horrible thought that you can just have one peak. I think most careers have many ups and downs. But by 1946, she had just completed a string of films with really distinguished directors, and it is arguable that 1946 was the peak of her career as an actress and someone who is determining her own approach to her career. And this coincided with factors in the rest of the world, where the industry was at a peak in Hollywood in 1946, because so many veterans were returning from the war and wanting to go to the movies with their dates. And there was now a reopening of the foreign markets after the war, so there were profits to be made abroad. 

Karina: With the success of "Scarlet Street", the dreams and goals of all three members of the Diana team were vindicated. The honeymoon wouldn't last for long. After "Scarlet Street", Diana productions hired Joan's sister Barbara to read novels, looking for film material. She suggested a number of properties that she felt would make perfect showcases for her sister. One novel Barbara recommended was called, "None so Blind" and though Wanger passed on acquiring the material, when RKO picked it up, they wanted Joan Bennett to star. Joan had enough power at the time that she was able to pick her director and she picked Jean Renoir. To capitalize on the success of "The Woman in the Window," Renoir's movie would be called "Woman on the Beach," but it was a very different beast than that earlier hit. 

Vanessa: It's very much of a mood piece and all of the characters are suffering some form of PTSD. Robert Ryan plays a coast guard lieutenant, Joan's character is married to a famous painter, but they've had this fight in the past that was drunken and abusive and she accidentally blinded him, so he can no longer paint. That is his trauma, and Joan is traumatized by the fact that she caused his blindness and she feels terrible guilt about it and is attached to him for the rest of their lives so she can take care of him. So when she and Robert Ryan meet they're bonding over the fact that they have an understanding of what PTSD is, and it brings them together. 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "When the ghosts get too insistent you have to get rid of them." 

Robert Ryan [Acting]: "But how?"

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "As long as you struggle against them, you never will. They'll torment you constantly, but if you stop fighting them, give in, they'll soon go away." 

Robert Ryan [Acting]: "Give in? What happens to you?"

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "You find a kind of peace. You don't care anymore. I oughtta know." 

Robert Ryan [Acting]: "From what I've heard it hasn't been easy."

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "It's not hard to guess you had torpedoed. It was pretty bad, very bad. But have you ever had everything and then suddenly had nothing? Nothing but ghosts. Oh, why should I bore you with this?" 

Robert Ryan [Acting]: "You're not, I think I understand. We're pretty much alike aren't we?" 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Yes. Yes. Perhaps we are." 

Vanessa: So he falls in love with her and then wants to test whether her husband is really blind or not because if he's faking, then he can prove it and free Joan to be with him. But again, that is not how it ends up. So these love triangles are all doomed I think. 

Karina: This would be another femme fatale part for Joan, one of her most desperate and Renoir was amused by how little the real Joan resembled her characters. 

Vanessa: Renoir wrote to Paul Cézanne about Joan and how funny it is to him that she's considered this dangerous sexpot on the screen because in real life, she's very modest about all of the gadgets that actors use. The tricks, the false eyelashes, or false teeth, or wigs, and she's got no shame about it and she spends her time knitting on set. He couldn't understand how American moral groups could be so up in arms about Joan Bennett. 

Karina: After a disappointing test screening, Renoir decided to rework and reshoot much of the movie, whatever he was trying to do to appeal to American audiences didn't work. "Woman on the Beach" got terrible reviews and didn't find an audience. It took so long for Renoir to rework it, that in between the initial shoot and the release, Joan was able to complete and see the release of another film. This one with an elaborate location shoot with rural Mexico subbing for Africa. "The Macomber Affair" based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway is the story of Francis Macomber, a wealthy American who travels with his wife Margot, played by Joan, to Kenya for a big game hunting safari. Margot is cold and cruel to her husband, viciously, needling, and emasculating him when not shamelessly flirting with his safari guide played by Gregory Peck. In the films climactic scene, Macomber, who has been unable to muster the courage to shoot anything big or dangerous, finally kills a buffalo, and Margot ostensibly trying to shoot a charging beast, kills her husband. Margot is perhaps Joan Bennett's least redeemable femme fatale. 

Gregory Peck [Acting]: "How does it feel to killed something?" 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "It was an accident!" 

Gregory Peck [Acting]: "What it do to a person? What about hunting, and conquering, the savagery of it? The emotions that make a man, a man and a woman a woman. Are you glad he's dead?" 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "You're out of your mind." 

Gregory Peck [Acting]: "You hated him and you were afraid of him. You became afraid of him when he lost his fear,"

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Maybe." 

Gregory Peck [Acting]: "You hated them and you wanted him dead. All you needed was a chance and when that chance came, you took it. It was easy to kill him. Wasn't it?" 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Yes, yes would've been easy. I did hate him. I was afraid." 

Gregory Peck [Acting]: "And we're watching this with a gun in your hand, you find yourself looking at them with a gun sight and that split second, you thought now, do it now, no one will ever know." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Stop!" 

Gregory Peck [Acting]: "You wanted him dead. You wanted to kill him. It was so easy to squeeze the trigger and he was-"

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Stop! I wanted him dead. Maybe I killed him, if there's such a thing as murder of the heart. There's your certain answer."

Vanessa: Critics loved her in the role she received rave reviews. I think what is impressive that Joan pulls off is Hemingway's brand of femininity because he is clearly most interested in and obsessed with masculinity, and how when Macomber shoots his first Buffalo is the moment that he becomes a man. That's the whole point of the short story. That's the line spoken by Gregory Peck that, you know, his life was short, but at least it was happy because he got to taste true masculinity, which is the feeling of having killed big game killed and succeeded. 

Karina: Hemingway's story indicated that Margot would get away with shooting her husband. The movie did not, whether or not his death was an accident, no Hollywood movie could let a woman get away with being so awful to her husband while he was alive.

Ronald Davis: Gregory Peck told me that, that he felt this was going to be the best film version of a Hemingway story ever."

Joan Bennett: Right.

Ronald Davis: And he felt that 90% of it was, but that there was a problem with the ending in that era. The wife had to be punished. 

Joan Bennett: Yeah.

Ronald Davis: And it was a kind of hokey ending. He felt.

Joan Bennett: Yeah, he's a nice person. 

Ronald Davis: Yes he is.

Karina: "The Macomber Affair" was well-received, but then came the dismal performance of "Woman on the Beach", which coincided with a precipitous drop in box office revenue. 1947 was the worst year for Hollywood in some time. Joan was nearing the end of her viability as an onscreen sex symbol. And, unfortunately, the end of that viability may have been hastened by the very partnership that had cemented her reputation as a femme fatale

After "Scarlet Street", Lang couldn't decide on a next film to direct under Diana's auspices. Ever happy to point fingers, he complained that Wanger seized all the really good submissions for his other Universal deal. Lang finally settled on a project called "Secret Beyond the Door". It began as a serial that ran in Red Book in 1945, but Lang essentially digested the source material and regurgitated it as something of his own.

He dictated large swaths to the screenwriter, Sylvia Richards, who had previously authored the lurid, Joan Crawford, psychodrama "Possessed." Richards was also Fritz Lang's new girlfriend, and this film would come under fire in part, because some felt that relationship clouded the directors judgment. "Secret" is a psychological thriller about a woman trapped in a house with a man who she loves, but has reason to fear. "Secret Beyond the Door" plays like a precursor of a 1960s, European art film with images of Joan walking slowly or staring off into space paired with voiceover that's meant to be her sometimes warring in her monologue. Bennett biographer, Brian Kellow, wrote that Joan felt the script was pretentious, which she may have, but she also had a lot of faith in Lang. Though, she would complain that the director treated her like a puppet, he had puppeteered her best performances and Lang was trying something unprecedented here.

Vanessa: Joan was basically a detective in this highly psychological drama, looking at the mysterious signs of her new husband's strange behavior and how what was locked in this room in this mansion that she moves into after marrying him could be equated with what's locked in his mind in his unconscious. It's one of the few film noir, which explores the question of the woman's voice and her story because the first person voiceover narration that is common in 1940s film noir almost always belongs to the male protagonist. And here is the woman who investigates the man, and her centrality is emphasized because it's her voiceover narration.

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "I remember long ago I read a book that told the meaning of dreams. It said that if a girl dreams of a boat or a ship, she will reach a safe hub, but if she dreams of death, she is in great danger. But this is no time for me to think of danger. This is my wedding day." 

Karina: For the first and last time, on this film, Joan exercised her power as a producer. 

Vanessa: Fritz Lang had wanted to work with his cinematographer from "Scarlet Street," but Joan chose Stanley Cortez, who is a good fit for the subject because he lights the whole thing in this moody Gothic way, which reflects the material really well and Joan in it. So Joan and Fritz Lang had a contentious relationship on this movie because she was producing and standing up to him and he was coming off of a success with "Scarlet Street" and apparently that made him even more of a tyrant. He was more demanding and abusive than usual. Joan said he was only adorable after a flop. So he would become adorable again after this, but to work with him on this was not easy. 

Karina: In the coming decades, it would become trendy for film directors to put their actors into unexpected, uncomfortable, or even dangerous situations in order to elicit spontaneous quote unquote real reactions. In this, Fritz Lang was a pioneer for better or in the case of "Secret Beyond the Door" worse. He and Richard scripted a climactic scene in which the married couple would have to flee their burning home, and as we heard in the opening to this episode, he refused to allow Joan Bennett and her co star, Michael Redgrave, to be replaced by stunt doubles. This was long before the days of CGI, so it meant that Joan would actually have to move through a set while it was on fire. Lang likely knew this would trigger memories of one of Joan's greatest traumas.

Vanessa: On mother's day in 1943, 2 months before my mother was born, Joan's dream house designed by Wallace Neff that she had built from the ground up, burned down in a fire caused by a short circuiting hot water heater in the basement. They lost a ton of memorabilia, books, they lost memories, and because of the war time shortage rebuilding that home would take at least a year after that. So it was pretty brutal and cruel of Fritz Lang because she was near-sighted and to not only experience a fire again, but a real fire burning down a home was not fun. It was torture I think, and that's one of the examples of Fritz Lang exploiting his actors. 

Karina: But there were petty fights on set too. Once Lang became outraged at what he saw as Joan's inability to look beautiful while drinking out of a straw. After a bad first preview, the studio took the film away from Lang and recut it. Still Lang labored over a way to sell this film that was clearly turning out to be a turnkey. Having concluded that psychological thrillers were passe, he fell back on an old gimmick. The social problem film. What was the problem at the center of this one? Essentially heterosexual sexual politics, Lang who had only made this movie in the way he made it because of his complicated entanglements with two women, screenwriters, Sylvia, Richards and actress Joan Bennett now seem to be warning men to stay strong in the face of feminine power. As Lang put it in interviews, 

Fritz Lang [Reenactment]: "Be on guard for women." 

Karina: "Secret Beyond the Door" became the biggest money loser of the year for Universal. In her 1985 oral history interview, Joan indicated that Diana couldn't survive its failure.

Ronald Davis: And what was your thinking when Diana Productions was formed?

Joan Bennett: No, I thought it was fine. 

Ronald Davis: Did ya? 

Joan Bennett: Yeah. But I don't think "Secret Beyond the Door" was much of a success, and that was the end.

Ronald Davis: That was the end. 

Karina: But in other interviews, Fritz and Joan, each blamed the other. Not for their work exactly, but for the distractions caused by their personal lives. It was, she said, 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "Fritz had fallen in love with the woman that was writing the script. It was a disaster." 

Karina: Versus he said, 

Fritz Lang [Reenactment]: "Joan Bennett wanted to divorce her husband." 

Karina: In other words, Lang was suggesting that a major distraction to the making of "Secret Beyond the Door" was the supposedly shaky state of the Wanger marriage. 

Vanessa: I think Fritz Lang might've pointed the attention toward the two of them, because he wanted to deflect from himself and taking responsibility for the fact that he was sleeping with the screenwriter, Sylvia Richards, and maybe not being critical enough of the screenplay. Generally speaking movies that don't work, don't work because of a screenplay that wasn't ready to begin with, and I think others could see that the script needed work before they began shooting and Fritz Lang was ready to go ahead with it as it was. We don't have any evidence that Joan was considering divorcing Walter while she was working with Fritz Lang. And in fact, while they were still making "Secret Beyond the Door", Joan became pregnant with her youngest daughter, Shelly. The truth is Fritz Lang seated control on "Secret" to the movie's screenwriter and then he lost control to the studio when the first cut was a mess, but it's very interesting that he'd want to deflect blame onto Joan and Walter's marriage. 

Karina: Regardless of what was going on in Joan Bennett's personal life, now her career was mired and uncertainty. She wasn't the only one in this predicament. Next time on Love as a Crime, the old Hollywood studio system goes into a downward spiral and Walter Wanger's career gets caught up in the current

Vanessa: Love is a Crime is a Vanity Fair presentation in partnership with Cadence 13. Executive produced, created, written and hosted by Vanessa Hope and Karina Longworth. Starring Zooey Deschanel as Joan Bennett, John Ham as Walter Wanger, and Johannes Grenzfurthner as Fritz Lang. Our executive producer is Chris Corcoran and our showrunner is Jacquelyn Jamjoom. Production support provided by Nico Steele, Julia Doyle and Lindsay D Shoenholtz. Theme music composed by Lionel Cohen and Vybbes, audio produced and supervised by Shelby Comstock Britten and mixed by Gintas Norvilla and Rainhouse. Special thanks to Katey Rich from Vanity Fair and Julie Shen and Kelly Bales from Condé Nast.

Karina: Love is a Crime was written by Vanessa Hope and Karina Longworth who consulted the following published sources in researching this episode, "The Bennetts: An Acting Family," by Brian Kellow, published by the University Press of Kentucky, used by permission of the University Press of Kentucky. "Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent," by Matthew Bernstein, published by the University of Minnesota, used by permission from the University of Minnesota Press. "The Bennett Playbill" by Joan, published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, used by permission of Henry Holt and company, LLC. Joan Bennett estate and Lois Kibbee estate. This episode also includes an interview with Matthew Bernstein. Archival clips sourced from the tapes from the Ronald Davis oral history collection on the performing arts at Southern Methodist University used by permission from DeGolyer library, Southern Methodist University and clips from the following motion pictures: "Scarlet Street", "The Woman on the Beach," "Secret Beyond the Door," and "The Macomber Affair." Fact checking by Laura Bullard.