A slow moving thriller with no thrills, suspense or logic to it. Anthony Perkins turns in an unconvincing performance as a brain surgeon and criminal mastermind. Charles Bronson, playing an amnesia victim, spends the whole time looking lost and confused; Maybe he thought he was part of the audience. Jill Ireland looks good but shows no real talent for acting. The lack of a tense background score (Instead, a movement from Dvorak's "New World Symphony" plays on a record player) makes the proceedings seem even more dry and lifeless. The tedium goes on far too long, with scant reward for those viewers who make it to the end. Cannot recommend this film.

Sadly after watching this thriller, based on the French novel by Jacques Robert "Quelqu'un derriere la porte", I can only say that it didn't stand the time. It's very slowly and has nothing to offer. To make it even worse Anthony Perkins isn't really great here and Jill Ireland is only for a few moments in it. Even Charles Bronson, an actor I do like didn't gave his best performance here.To make it even worse the version I saw was out of sync and had a lot of drops and hiss on the sound. Not even that, it also had a few reels with the wrong colour temperature. It was on official DVD but looked clearly as a VHS rip of bad quality. Anthony tries to give a creepy performance as in Psycho (1960) as doctor Laurence Jeffries who has bad things in his mind with the amnesiac unknown man (Charles Bronson) to make him believe that his wife Frances Jeffries (Jill Ireland) is in fact the unknown man's wife and is cheating on him so she has to die. But Anthony somehow just can't give us a creepy or even believable performance. Charles Bronson is okay but he was here in a period that he wasn't really cast in blockbusters. He just came from Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) and was casted as a man with few words but much action. Here he has a lot of words and no action and you can see that it wasn't his thing. He was casted in European flicks but after this one he went back with his wife Jill Ireland to US soil to make a few hard-edged crime and western dramas starting from 1972. Of course the big break through came in 1974 together with his wife in the controversial revenge flick Death Wish. The audience couldn't get enough of tough guy Bronson while his flicks became more and more violent. He was a late bloomer in Hollywood but what an actor he became. Someone Behind The Door has a title that is never explained and isn't one of the three main actors (Perkins, Ireland, Bronson) most famous flick. Gore 0/5 Nudity 0,5/5 Effects 0/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

I'd always been interested in watching this one (which occasionally turns up on late-night Italian TV) due to its star combo; now that I've caught up with it, I found it to be an intriguing if deliberately-paced psychological puzzler – where, as was the case with the later THE LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE (1976), director Gessner demonstrates himself an unsung master of the offbeat and provocative thriller. Leads Charles Bronson and Anthony Perkins work very well off each other; while the latter has played this type of role before (it's what he does best, yet given enough subtle shadings to retain an element of surprise), the former credibly stretches his range with his amnesiac role (duped into committing murder by Perkins' scheming cuckolded doctor).Most reviews I've read seem unable to swallow the central premise – that Perkins would devise the perfect crime by 'brainwashing' Bronson into believing himself to be a totally different person – but I feel that it works most of the time mainly due to the excellent leads (nearly falling apart at the climax but picks up again nicely with the ending, as Bronson's memory is suddenly jolted back through ironically similar circumstances and his real-life spouse Jill Ireland confronts on-screen husband Perkins with his failure as both doctor and man). The film, then, concludes on a marvelous note – a series of close-ups, alternating between Ireland and Perkins, that follow the rhythm of a beating heart (though the effect is somewhat dissipated by going on too long).My viewing of SOMEONE BEHIND THE DOOR came via a public-domain print on a budget DVD I rented (which slapped this Bronson title together with two other lesser vehicles – GUNS OF DIABLO [1964] and COLD SWEAT [1970], both also watched recently). I'd like to own the Gessner film someday; at least, I know it's available in widescreen on a bare-bones disc from Lionsgate – though I wonder how long it will stay in print...

Interesting psychological thriller. (I'd love to know what stage play it is based on.) The angst and drama don't quite hold up to the end but it is a nice ride getting there.