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Fantastic!

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Reporter Lucille Bremer (Kathy) convinces private investigator Richard Carlson (Ross) to go undercover as a patient into the "Siesta Sanitarium" where she believes wanted man Herbert Hayes (Judge Drake) is hiding out. Indeed, he is there. Behind locked doors and with the protection of the staff at the institution, headed by Thomas Browne Henry (Dr Porter) and sadistic warden Douglas Fowley (Larson). Once inside, Carlson also comes face to face with violent inmate Tor Johnson (the "Champ").The film is OK. It needed a little more pace during the beginning sequences at the asylum. While it is not a bad film, it is all familiar stuff these days, and you can probably predict the ending. The staff and patients at the mental hospital are stereotypical and somewhat cartoonish but the film keeps you watching during its short running length.There is an interesting fun game to play at the beginning of the film where Bremer and Carlson decide to pick a mental illness to have. Hmmm….what to choose…they consider schizophrenia before settling for depression. Yep, nice choice. They then read up about all the symptoms and behaviours associated with the condition before getting their deception past the doctor. Everyone plays this game nowadays in their quest to get off sick from work. So, it's a film ahead of its time in that respect.I thought Lucille Bremer got the more memorable scenes – the interview with Thomas Browne Henry in order to get Carlson admitted into the hospital and her sudden appearance in a scene towards the end of the film. She also had some good dialogue to keep the rather slimy Carlson at arm's length. Unfortunately, the film's quality is poor with interference throughout.Sanitariums no longer exist, so you can no longer bluff your way into these places, but if you fancy 3 years off work – approach your boss with details of a new mental illness which manifests itself in an ability to actually show up and do some work as required. There won't be any psychologist theories about this and you should ask to be rushed immediately home to recuperate.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)It seems like everything done in black and white in the forties, unless there was some singing and dancing in it, is now a film noir. (Well, excluding Olivier's 1949 Hamlet, I suppose.) When this "Poverty Row" production came out in 1948 I'm sure it was billed as a mystery/suspense tale, but never mind. "Film noir" is now a growth industry.There's a gumshoe, Ross Stewart played by Richard Carlson, whom I recall most indelibly as Herbert A. Philbrick of TV's cold war espionage series "I Led Three Lives" from the fifties when HUAC had us all looking under our beds for commies. Lucille Bremer, near the end (which was also near the beginning) of a very modest filmland career, co-stars as Kathy Lawrence, a newspaper woman with a story idea. She needs a private eye to do the investigative dirty work.Ross Stewart has just hung out his gumshoe shingle and had the frosted glass door of his office lettered and is paying the painter when Kathy Lawrence shows up. (I love all the private eye movies which begin with the dame showing up at the PI's office needing help. So logical, so correct; so like a noir "Once upon a time.") She wants him to pretend to be insane so that she can get him committed to a private sanitarium where she believes a corrupted judge is hiding, thus the locked doors in the title.What I liked about this is the way the low-budget production meshed with the gloomy and aptly named "La Siesta Sanitarium," the scenes shot in rather dim light giving everything a kind of shady appearance. The story itself and the direction by Oscar "Budd" Boetticher defines "pedestrian," but there is a curious and authentic period piece feel to the movie that can't be faked. Postmodern directors wanting to capture late-forties, early fifties L.A. atmosphere would do well to take a look at this tidy 62-minute production.Tor Johnson, the original "hulk" (perhaps) plays a dim-witted but violent punch drunk ex-fighter who is locked in a padded cell. He comes to life when the fire extinguisher outside his door is sadistically "rung" by one of the attendants with his keys, thereby springing the hulk into shadow boxing imaginary opponents. Could it be that he will get a live one later on...?See this for Richard Carlson who made a fine living half a century ago playing the lead or supporting roles in a slew of low budget mystery, horror and sci fi pictures, most notably perhaps The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954).

In the noir cycle, if you were looking for sinister skulduggery, you needn't have searched any farther than the closest mental institution. Creepy snake-pits were the setting, in whole or in part, of (just to name a few) Strange Illusion, Spellbound, Shock, The High Wall and Shock Corridor. But maybe the scariest asylum of them all was La Siesta, in Oscar (later, Budd) Boetticher's Behind Locked Doors.You'd have to be crazy to go there, because while its name promises cozy afternoon naps, what it delivers is apt to be the big sleep. Private eye Richard Carlson doesn't want to go either, but he up and falls for a reporter (Lucille Bremer) who persuades him to do the inside legwork on a story she was after. (A corrupt judge has vanished, and his girlfriend has been making nocturnal visits to La Siesta, where she's ushered in through a side door.) So they fool a doctor in giving Carlson a diagnosis of manic depression, and he becomes an inmate.Inside, Carlson uncovers a web of secrets and lies, enforced by sadistic attendant Douglas Fowley with the help, as a last resort, of a punch-drunk prizefighter who's kept in a cage-like cell (Tor Johnson, who also graced Plan 9 From Outer Space). The intrigue centers around the judge, who's paying off the head of the hospital to hide him. But, when suspicions are raised by a deliberate act of arson, Carlson becomes the top item on the hit list....At barely more than an hour, the movie doesn't have any time to waste, so Boetticher moves at a pretty fast clip (only the ending seems rushed). He lays on the shadows, too, with characters ominously silhouetted against walls and doors. More of an old dark house story, really, than a more freighted and ambiguous noir, Behind Locked Doors sets its sights modestly but achieves them handily.Note: The plot summary of this movie in the `bible' – Silver and Ward's Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style – is hopelessly garbled, as though two different films had become confused.

This little b movie , made for next to nothing has more suspense & interest than most of todays so called big films we were completley enthralled especially by Lucille Bremer. a very beautiful actress who had too short a careersee this little gemJay Harris