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What can we possibly learn from a propagandist film made in 1919, after World War I, by a white American Southerner? The kind who had a Confederate flag jammed in the barrel of a rifle at his doorstep? For years after it released, Irvin Willat’s silent Behind the Door had the reputation of being a film that shocked because of the brutal fashion in which an enemy officer was depicted meeting his end. “A climax of terrific power which is so horrible that it may sicken,” one review said.
In its recent second run, following a laborious restoration in 2017,
