Everything about this movie is masterful, from the story to the performances to the costumes to the sets. Charles Vidor did an excellent job of adapting a stage production to the screen. It is appropriately claustrophobic but never stale.

Rip Van Brett (Kent Taylor) is getting married. He comes from one of the oldest established and wealthiest families in New York, so when he chooses a nurse (Evelyn Venable) to be a his bride, his spinster sister Victoria (Mary Morris) is unhappy. She has already foiled one sibling Caroline (Anne Revere) from finding wedded bliss, and she intends to break up her brother's happiness too with her underhanded schemes.

This film was shown at Cinevent 2014, and everyone I knew who saw it at another film festival urged me to see it. Apparently word of mouth spread because the screening was packed. The audience ate it up, to the point that several times people began yelling at the screen. If you ever get a chance to see this, DO NOT miss it.

Based on the 1933 Broadway play of the same name by Elizabeth A. McFadden, Double Door is a pre-Hays Code directed by Charles Vidor (Gilda, Blind Alley).

Victoria Van Brett (Mary Morris, who had a long stage career but this was her only film) rules her family, even destroying the relationships that her brother Rip (Kent Taylor, Brain of Blood many years after this) has until Anne Darrow (Evelyn Venable, the voice and the model for the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio and one of the rumored inspirations for the Columbia Pictures logo) starts dating him. Just how horrible is Victoria? Well, she once locked her sister Caroline (Anne Revere, who would win the Best Supporting Oscar for National Velvet and be an outspoken critic of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which got her blacklisted) in a soundproof safe for a long period of time just for making her mad.

I mean, she also has one of the servants close the organ during "Here Comes the Bride" as Victoria and Rip are being married in her house, so there's really no limit to the amount of mean that she has in store for everyone. That must be how she got the name "The Female Frankenstein of Fifth Avenue."

It is the performance of the forgotten stage actress Mary Morris who you will remember here, that is if you are lucky enough to find a copy of this rare gem. Obviously based on a stage melodrama which starred miss Morris, she is here in her only film role and is playing a highly despicable character whom you know needs to be locked up and institutionalized herself. As a dominating matriarch of a New York old money family, she has kept her younger sister Anne Revere and her younger half brother under her thumb.

When the younger brother falls in love with the pretty Evelyn Venable, Morris hates her instantly, and takes drastic steps to prevent the family dynamic from being invaded from an outsider. A spooky flashback shows the younger Morris with her half brother doing deeds of such creepiness that you know this is a madness that goes way back, possibly caused by the presumed cruelty of this family's deceased patriarch.

The double door title refers to the family vault, a sound proof room off of Morris's bedroom where the family valuables are kept. through a conversation with Anne Revere and Morris we learn that the older sister has use this as punishment and may do so again should her whacked out brain push her to take these evil steps.

Somewhat theatrical, this is a strange melodrama that is very Edgar Allan Poe in nature although not quite a horror story. There are certainly elements of horror in it, but this is more a melodrama of old money at its presumed entitlement and the methods that some members of the upper class will go to in order to keep family members in line. If this had been made in the 1940's or 1950's, it probably would have had a male patriarch played by Vincent Price rather than the female character, one of the rare genuinely evil women on film in this time period.

Eerie organ music is heard over a few of the melodramatic scenes, and it almost appears to be like a filmed radio play. The young Anne Revere would play similarly severe sisters or mothers as Morris's in films in the 1940s, but nothing came close to this. Standing next to Morris, the male involvement makes the men seem like wimps, and Revere and Venable are definitely upstaged by the subtle performance of Miss Morris who only goes over the top in the necessary mad scene near the end.

it will be pretty obvious to you how the film is going to conclude, but half the fun is getting to that point. I have seeing some grizzly endings in films of this nature, but in watching this even assuming what was going to happen, I was still spooked. So hopefully this will be rediscovered and audiences will find an opportunity to see a rare, forgotten actress show what was being on stages around the country, especially in little theaters that specialized in the plays that are now known as Barnstormers.