Displaying items by tag: Lilli Palmer

THE DOOR WITH SEVEN LOCKS

UK, 1940, 86 minutes, Black-and-white.

Leslie Banks, Lilli Palmer, Romilly Lunge, Gina Malo, Richard Bird, David Horne, Cathleen Nesbitt, R. Montgomery.

Directed by Norman Lee.

A British thriller of the 1940s. There is a great deal of plot because the film is based on an Edgar Wallace novel.

The film opens with a set-up, an elderly man dying, wanting his usual and to be buried with him to be ready for the bride of his son when he marries. And, as caution, the door has seven locks. They are put in the safekeeping of his lawyer.

However, the audience sees that there is a sinister group led by Leslie Banks as the Spanish doctor, accent and all, who functions locally but also has a huge Museum with souvenirs of torture over the ages, presided over by a picture of Torquemada. There is a couple, a chauffeur, and a very sinister butler (the only film credit for R. Montgomery, surprisingly because he is tall, a sinister face that would be at home with the Munsters or in the Addams Family).

The money is to be inherited by the son of the man who dies, but with an ailment, he lives overseas. The other possible inheritor is a young woman, June, played vigorously by Lilli Palmer, who has lived in Canada.

The action takes place in the present when June receives a message to come to a mysterious stranger in a sanatorium who explains something of the keys and then is shot. Jude is imprisoned and every aspect of the sanatorium and disappears. She then goes to Scotland Yard where there is an attractive detective who is just resigning and his partner who is astute but always nodding off, the sympathetic lawyer explaining to police at Scotland Yard the situation with the seven keys in his keeping, the young man overseas but corresponding with letters.

The rest of the action takes place at the mysterious country mansion, managed by the doctor. There is a visit to his museum – and one of his severe implements trapping him at the end. There is also the tomb in the door with the seven locks.

Gradual revelations of what has been going on, the conspiracy, the reason why the members of the conspiracy are still hanging round, the challenge with June arriving, and the detectives, and a buildup to the various fights, shootouts, and the torture chamber.

And some twists at the end, especially concerning the younger son as well as the lawyer.