A judge who has run afoul of the law has gone into hiding. Reporter Kathy Lawrence (Lucille Bremer) believes she has tracked the judge to a private sanitarium. She hires a private detective, Ross Stewart (Richard Carlson), to go undercover as a patient to help find the judge. Stewart quickly falls out of favor with one of the sanitarium attendants and puts himself in danger. Can they bust open the case before Stewart's cover is blown?There's an amazing amount of entertainment stuffed into Behind Locked Doors' less than 62 minute runtime. Being brief, there's no time for filler. This is one quick, fast paced film. Even so, director Budd Boetticher was still able to give the film atmosphere – and I love atmosphere. The sanitarium setting, with the locked rooms upstairs housing the dangerous patients, provides the right amount of mystery. The cast is good – especially for a B-noir. Richard Carlson has always seemed like a very capable actor and does good work here. I wasn't at all familiar with Lucille Bremer, but she gives her reporter just the right amount of spunk. As good as they are, though, it's Douglas Fowley that really makes this film tick. He is the perfect, brutal advisory for our heroes. Finally, I got a little joy when I realized that Tor Johnson had a brief, but pivotal, role in Behind Locked Doors. He's as convincing as anyone in the film playing the dangerous, mute psycho. It's nice to see Tor is a "good" movie for a change. I'm sure I could pick apart the movie and write about plot holes and logic inconsistencies, but Behind Locked Doors is so entertaining that I had no problem looking past these issues.

That is, the private detective who agreed to pretend he was a nut case so he could get locked up in private loony bin where the pretty reporter who hired him suspects a corrupt judge on the lam from the law is hiding out. Only a beautiful dame and a healthy hunk of dough could entice a private eye to take on such a tough case. The dame was beautiful enough, if somewhat distant, and the ten thousand dollar reward was healthy enough. That's the plot of minor 1948 noir thriller Behind Locked Doors, and it works well enough in the hands of tough action specialist director Bud (billed Oscar) Boetticher. His taut direction, a tight script by Eugene Ling and Malvin Wald, and good work by the supporting cast, overcome low production values and lackluster leads.Richard Carlson, the detective, was a competent actor, but if somebody gave an award for the blandest leading man of all time, he would be in the running. Lucille Bremer, the beautiful reporter, was indeed beautiful, but she was undoubtedly at her best as a dancer (she could keep up with Fred Astaire!). As an actress, her talents were suspect. She is not even at her best in Behind Locked Doors. Since she was set to marry a millionaire and retire from the screen, it is likely that this, her last picture, was just fulfilling a contract obligation. It shows in her unenthusiastic performance. The obligatory romance between her and Carlson is sort of like a cigarette lighter with a used-up flint -- no spark. Lucille is more convincing when she's resisting his advances in the early going than when eliciting them in the later reels.No Matter. This is an action, suspense picture, and their is plenty of both. Solid support to prop up the flaccid leads is provided by Thomas Browne Henry as the troubled doctor in charge of the institution, Douglas Fowley as a sadistic warder, and the always interesting (in a bizarre way) Tor Johnson as a homicidal maniac. Shadowy cinematography by Guy Roe heightens the sinister mood of the story and no doubt at the same time covers up cheap sets. Boetticher's sharp direction keeps the pace snappy and the suspense taut with nary a wasted shot in this little 63 minute programmer.Take a gander at the poster pitching Behind Locked Doors. Beautiful Miss Bremer is pictured apparently swooned and lying limp and seductive while being carried by menacing hulk Tor Johnson. Nothing of the sort happens in this picture! Hollywood didn't invent the art of deceptive advertising -- surely it goes back at least as far as the early Roman Empire -- but the movie studios of Old Hollywood were certainly among its top exponents. Lurid and often sexy "promo shots" bearing little or no relation to the actual content of the picture were standard fare for movie posters of the era.Nevertheless, much does happen in a short time in Behind Locked Doors, much of it lurid, though none sexy -- except perhaps for those of the persuasion that gets a kick out of seeing a woman tied up. If you're looking for a short, filler type of movie, this well-made thriller will keep your attention for and hour and three minutes.

Richard Carlson goes "Behind Locked Doors" in this 1948 film also starring Lucille Bremer. Carlson plays detective Ross Stewart who enters an insane asylum as a patient at the behest of a reporter Kathy Lawrence (Bremer) to find a judge who is on the lam from the police. For his trouble, there is a $10,000 reward, which he and Lawrence will split, but she has to make sure the Judge is in the asylum first. They play man and wife, and she has him committed. Once inside, Stewart discovers that the place is run somewhat inhumanely, and that the judge may be in a ward of the asylum that is locked and inaccessible to other patients.This is a B movie all the way with decent performances by Carlson and Bremer, Douglas Fowley and Tor Johnson and good direction by Budd Boetticher. I sort of hoped that, although the Bremer character was on the trail of the judge, that she might have been interested in some of the bad conditions at the asylum and wanted to expose them. Though things don't stay as they are there, it would have been nice if earlier, she had mentioned having any interest in it. Guess she just wanted the big story.Good but not exceptional.

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.