Behind Locked Doors

Most well-known for his later Westerns starring Randolph Scott, Oscar (Budd) Boetticher directed several noirs during the 1940’s, including this insane asylum quickie, Behind Locked Doors. It opens with a nearly perfect noir sequence of events: on a lonely, dark street, a strange woman nervously watches a figure enter the gate of a sanatorium, followed the next day by a visit to the office of a cocky, lecherous private eye whose services she solicits with great urgency. The woman is newspaper reporter Kathy Lawrence (Lucille Bremer) and the initially reluctant private eye is Ross Stewart (Richard Carlson) who agrees (for a shared reward) to go undercover as a mental patient committed to the private sanitarium where Kathy believes a corrupt judge has been hiding from law enforcement. It turns out the “hospital” is run by sadistic despots who treat patients like convicts and punish them by locking them in a room with a gigantic, violent ogre named the Champ (Tor  Johnson). Boetticher utilizes a full palette of shadows to cloak the hospital in intrigue, particularly during Stewart’s midnight explorations and visits to the Champ’s cell. Shrieks in the night contrast with moments of levity, perhaps most (unintentionally) amusing the ease with which we’re led to believe a fake patient can be committed to a psychiatric hospital.