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My favorite Joan Bennett film is Secret
Beyond the Door (1948). It got terrible reviews and wasn't one of Joan's favorite movies. But I don't care-----I
love it!! Perhaps with its psychological overtones, it was just ahead of its time?
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This unsuccessful venture was the fourth and final association
of Lang and Joan. The director would later recollect: "It wasn't my idea to make it-----Wanger had some old scripts
and it was jinxed from the beginning-----trouble with cameramen, trouble with script. . . .I had an idea that the subconscious
voice-----when we hear Celia's (JB) thoughts-----should be spoken by another actress. Because it was a different
person-----something in us we perhaps don't know. But Joan told me she would be very unhappy if I did that,
so I dropped it." (My opinion is he's an idiot about that; that would have been more confusing that what
he gave us. Also, I've seen quite a few pictures from the film that were never in
the film. Perhaps the whole problem was the editing/cutting Lang chose .)
Joan's fourth daughter, Shelley Wanger, was born by caesarian section on July 4, 1948,
weighing six pounds, four ounces.
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| with Paul Henreid in HOLLOW TRIUMPH (aka THE SCAR), 1948 |
In July 1949, Joan became a grandmother
at the age of thirty-nine, when her married daughter,
Ditty, gave birth to her first child. Joan got a telegram
from Marlene Dietrich (the youngest grandmother in Hollywood up until then) that read,
"Thanks for taking the heat off."
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| with Rick Barrett in Secret Beyond the Door |
Joan has different memories of Secret Beyond the Door.
For the sequence in the burning house, director Lang refused to employ doubles, and Joan and Michael Redgrave were forced
to run through flames "time and again, and it wasn't a fire for toasting marshmallows." Joan revealed that Lang "was
a real Jekyll-and-Hyde character, calm and purposeful one moment, and off on a tirade the next." She further confided,
"When he was in a successful period, he was impossible and Darryl Zanuck told me, 'Let him have one good resounding flop and
he'll be adorable.' He got it in Secret Beyond the Door. It flopped and Fritz was adorable at once."
By this time, however, Joan was pregnant again, and Diana Productions ended on a somewhat ambivalent, but amicable note.
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| Walter, Stephanie, Joan, Shelley, Melinda, and Diana |
Soon after, Joan was seen in the Eagle-Lion's Hollow
Triumph (1948), a picture also know as The Scar. It was actor Paul Henreid's first venture as a producer,
a consuming task for a performer who was required to play a dual role on camera. As a whole, this film is engrossing.
Despite the movie being "loaded with bad dialogue, awkward dramatic cliches and poor direction" (Cue magazine), Joan
received a few kind notices, with Thomas Pryor (The New York Times), among others, thanking her "for helping out
in the clinches."
The Reckless Moment was Joan's sole release
for 1949. Expertly directed by Max Ophuls, the setting is a small coastal town in California. The serenity of
housewife Lucia's (JB) commonplace life is suddenly shattered when her rebelious daughter (Geraldine Brooks) has sexual relations
with a bad guy, who accidentally falls to his death from their boathouse. After Lucia hides the body and attempts
to cover up her daughter's involvement with the dead man, a blackmailer (James Mason) appears on the scene. The film
was not appreciated at the time, but had become something of a cult film by the 1970s.
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Joan Bennett, Diana Anderson, Diana Markey, Melinda Markey, Melinda
Beno, Stephanie Wanger, Stephanie Guest, Shelley Wanger, Shelley Mortimer, John Marion Fox, Gene Markey, Walter Wanger, Richard
Bennett, Constance Bennett, Barbara Bennett, Barbara Downey, Adrienne Morrison, Adrienne Bennett, Mabel Bennett, Mabel Morrison,
Adrienne Ralston Fox, www.joanbennett.net
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