Short Takes: ‘Someone Behind the Door’ (1971) ★★ 1/2

Somehow, I managed to live half my life without checking out the works of Charles Bronson. I remember seeing promos for TV matinee showings his 1970s classics—Mr. Majestyk, The Mechanic, Telefon—when I was in junior high, but those movies aired while I was in school, and I likely wouldn’t have watched them had I been home. I could’ve easily watched his movies in the 1980s, when Cannon Films could be counted on to dump a Bronson movie in multiplexes every year, but at that time I had no interest in watching an old man with a gun take out younger guys with guns. I was more excited about the release of Yentl. It was a lonely time.

But tastes and times change, and over the past few years I’ve been steadily working my way through Bronson’s filmography. I like his action shit, but I’m particularly fond of some of the European thrillers he made in the early 1970s, including Someone Behind the Door (or Quelqu’un derrière la porte if you’re fancy), directed by Nicolas Gessner.

Bronson plays an amnesiac, brought into a British hospital by a good Samaritan who found him wandering a nearby beach road. A neurosurgeon, Dr. Jeffries (Anthony Perkins), takes an interest in Bronson’s case and, after a brief examination, offers to take Bronson back to his home where he says he can observe Bronson more closely. “You know what hospitals are like,” Jeffries says. “They’ll just put you in a ward and forget about you.”

But the doctor has ulterior motives, but we already knew that as he’s played by Anthony Perkins. Jeffries has no interest in curing Bronson. He wants to manipulate him into murdering his cheating wife Frances (Bronson’s then real-life wife Jill Ireland) and her lover, played by Henri Garcin.

Someone Behind the Door isn’t the best of Bronson’s European films that I’ve seen (for my money, that would be Rider on the Rain, with Violent City a close second), but it’s an intriguing psychological thriller, nonetheless. Gessner, who directed 1976’s The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, doesn’t inject much style into his film and his screenplay, co-written by Marc Behm, is at times a bit too dry, yet the two leads make it an interesting watch. Bronson didn’t have the most expansive range as an actor, but he’s up to the challenge in this role that casts him against type. Perkins is better, even though his casting immediately tips the character’s hand. Garcin is merely serviceable, in a part that’s little more than a cameo. As for Ireland, she’s OK, though her performance does little to dissuade me from thinking most of Bronson’s movies from the 1970s would’ve been at least ten percent better had he been married to someone else.