Secret Beyond the Door... (1947)

Joan Bennett: Celia Lamphere

Photos 

Quotes 

• Mark Lamphere : You were living that fight. You soaked it all in - love, hate, the passion. You've been starved for feelings - any real feelings. I thought: 20th Century Sleeping Beauty. Wealthy American girl who has lived her life wrapped in cotton wool but she wants to wake up. Maybe she can.

  Celia Barrett : Is it as hard as all that?

  Mark Lamphere : Most people are asleep.

• Mark Lamphere : There's something in your face that I saw once before in South Dakota. Wheat country. Cyclone weather. Just before the cyclone, the air has a stillness. A flat, gold, shimmering stillness. You have it in your face - the same hush before the storm and when you smile it's like the first breath of wind bending down the wheat. I know that behind that smile is a turbulence that...

  Celia Barrett : I heard his voice and then I didn't hear it any more, because the beating of my blood was louder. This was what I'd hunted those foolish years in New York. I knew before I knew his name or touched his hand and for an endless moment I seemed to float like a feather blown to a place where time had stopped.

• Celia Barrett : Suddenly I felt that someone was watching me. There was a tingling at the nape of my neck as though the air had turned cool. I felt eyes touching me like fingers. There was a current flowing between us... warm and sweet... and frightening, too, because he saw behind my make-up what no-one had ever seen. Something I didn't know was there.

• [first lines] 

  Celia Barrett : [voice over]  I remember, long ago I read a book that told the meaning of dreams. It said that if a girl dreams of a boat or a ship she will reach a safe harbor, but if she dreams of daffodils she is in great danger. But this is no time for me to think of danger. This is my wedding day.

• Celia Barrett : Suddenly I'm afraid. I'm marrying a stranger, a man I don't know at all.

• [last lines] 

  Mark Lamphere : That night, you killed the root of the evil in me, but I still have a long way to go.

  Celia Lamphere : *We* have a long way to go.

• Mark Lamphere : Oh, by the way, I don't think that R.D. Will like that wallet if he's anything like me.

  Celia Barrett : He's not a bit like you.

  Mark Lamphere : And you're not a bit like you. I mean you aren't what you seem to be.