Someone Behind the Door (1971) ****

Dvorak would be turning in his grave at the audacity of using his New World Symphony (Ridley Scott used it with more subtlety for the Hovis advert a couple of years later) as the score for a Charles Bronson picture. But you could argue this really isn’t a Charles Bronson movie. He’s not the tough guy. He doesn’t come out all guns blazing. He doesn’t slap people around.

This is probably the biggest reversal of screen persona in Bronson’s career (if you exclude The Sandpiper, 1965, where he plays an artist, and you could probably chalk it off anyway because he wasn’t a star at that point). This is so far from the Bronson you guess it must be a cruel hoax.

Here, Bronson is the dupe, the patsy, the stooge.

Come again?

He’s not even dignified with a name, just “The Stranger.” In fact, this could be a remake of Rider on the Rain (1970) with Bronson playing the bad guy not the mysterious cop.

The Stranger, found standing in the road and no idea how he got there, ends up the patient of neurosurgeon and psychoanalyst Laurence (Anthony Perkins). The Stranger is suffering from amnesia so being the good guy he is, and always interested in another scalp for his casebook, Laurence takes him home – in Folkestone on the English south coast, next to Dover – and helps him begin the process of unravelling his identity.

Laurence is a bit cross, it has to be said, because he’s discovered his wife Frances (Jill Ireland) is having an affair with a French journalist Paul Damien. Laurence brings in his brother-in-law to break her alibi of always staying with him.

From a suitcase found on the nearby beach, whose clothes fit The Stranger, it’s conceivable this might be the very same Paul. But he could as easily be an escaped madman. Or he could be the chap who’s raped and murdered a blonde on the beach.

The Stranger, mightily confused, begins to suspect, especially when he finds a photo of a naked Jill in his pocket, he might indeed be Paul. And to even things up, he has reason to be jealous. If he is Frances’s lover, it could very well be Paul Damien to blame.

Naturally, Laurence has arranged for there to be gun handy. And gradually he twists the facts and works inventively to convince The Stranger that he should be very hot and bothered should, as appears likely, at any moment Frances and Paul walk through the door, allowing Laurence to take revenge and get off scot-free.

Whether The Stranger is ill or not, he is clearly easily led and pretty much accepts the situation Laurence presents. Any time he queries anything, Laurence has a ready answer.

So what you have really is two parallel tales of cat-and-mouse. On the one hand you have Laurence snaring The Stranger in a spider’s web of possibility and drawing a tighter noose around his wife and her lover (whoever that may be). But you also have, in his debut, clever-dick Hungarian director Nicolas Gessner (The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane, 1976) playing with audience expectation. At any moment, in the first parallel tale, you expect The Stranger will come to his senses, memory recovered, and putting an end to the nasty plan. Equally, at any moment, you expect the real Charles Bronson to stand up, take control and blast everyone to hell.

But neither of these possibilities occurs. The Stranger looks lost for the most part, diminished, outwitted, twisted around like an impotent puppet. Rather than concealing the difference in height between the principals ( that a big star is never smaller than anyone else seems set in the Hollywood Bible of Audience Deception), Bronson always appears to be cowering in front of Perkins.

Not falling back on his screen persona, in fact staying as far away from it as is possible (beyond showing off his torso from time to time to placate his female fans), Bronson delivers a more than believable performance as the little boy lost. This may not be an Oscar-winning elements performance, but in the Bronson portfolio this may well be his finest.

Sure, there a couple of implausible moments, but that’s par for the course in this kind of thriller.

And the coup de grace is that when, finally, Bronson does break loose of his shackles, it’s to act in a way no fan would like to see, when he commits a heinous act.

Bronson was far from the big Hollywood star at this point. While French audiences had certainly taken to him, that wasn’t reciprocated much elsewhere and despite being tossed into films like You Can’t Win ‘Em All (1970) opposite Tony Curtis and an international cast in eastern-western Red Sun (1971) he was still some way short of the top of the Hollywood tree. It would take another year before stardom was validated by the double whammy of The Valachi Papers (1972) and The Mechanic (1972) and another couple of years before Death Wish crowned him a superstar.

So it was an incredibly bold move to make such a shift away from creating a tough-guy screen persona. More so, to pull off such diffidence and weakness.

Interestingly, this isn’t the Anthony Perkins of Psycho (1960) either. He’s not the tic-ridden jumpy quavery-voiced individual that had appeared to be his screen persona.

Very much worth a look. Unless of course you don’t want to disturb your image of Bronson.