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The Strange Door

Blu Ray

Kino Lorber

1951 / 1:33:1 / 81 Min.

Starring Charles Laughton, Boris Karloff, Sally Forrest

Written by Jerry Sackheim

Cinematography by Irving Glassberg

Directed by Joseph Pevney

Charles Laughton is a vengeful aristocrat with a secret in the cellar and Boris Karloff is the family servant who holds the key to The Strange Door. Released in 1951, the Universal International period piece stars Laughton as Alain de Maletroit, a bitter reprobate who lures a fugitive into his castle with the promise of sanctuary in exchange for a wedding vow.

There’s a bright side to that peculiar overture – the mystery bride is de Maletroit’s niece, the prim but pliant Blanche played by the low key seductress Sally Forrest.

Laughton’s convoluted plan is a decades-long effort to corrupt Blanche and humiliate her father, Edmond, the man who stole Blanche’s mother from Laughton years before. The fugitive, Denis de Beaulieu,...

Above: Us three-sheet poster for The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, UK, 1933).

The great Charles Laughton may not have been the prettiest of movie stars, but he had a presence that many matinee idols would have killed for (as the current retrospective running at Film Forum will attest). In an era in which glamor was everything, studio marketers may have struggled with how to present Laughton’s unconventional looks and his larger-than-life portrayals of larger-than-life characters (so many monsters, murderers, tyrants, or simply overbearing fathers) to the public. In most of the posters for his most famous film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), he is all but a silhouette, a spoiler alert to his monstrous transformation as Quasimodo. And in some posters for The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), the film for which he won his first Oscar, Henry is made to look more like the Hans Holbein...

British-born actor Richard Stapley began his film career in Hollywood in the late 1940s. He starred as French nobleman Denis de Beaulieu, who becomes a pawn in Charles Laughton’s revenge plot in the 1951 horror thriller The Strange Door, with Boris Karloff as the menacing manservant Voltan.

Stapley was born in Westcliff, Essex, England, on June 20, 1923. He moved to Hollywood in the late 1940s, where he appeared in such films as The Challenge (1948), The Three Musketeers (1948) with Gene Kelly and Lana Turner, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1949) with June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor, King of the Khyber Rifles (1953), and Jungle Man-Eater (1954), with Johnny Weissmuller as Jungle Jim.

He returned to England in the late 1950s, where he continued his career in films and television under the name Richard Wyler. He starred as Interpol Agent Anthony Smith in the television series Man from Interpol from 1960 to 1961. He also appeared in episodes of The Saint,...