>>It looked to me like there was another door gaffe that occurred at the beginning of that scene. The Major enters his house then locks the front door. His son, following, can't get in and rattles the door knob a bit. The Major simply turns around, and there in the very next shot is his son standing in the open doorway! <<
I just watched the scene a few times. As another poster answered, the door remained closed and locked.
When the son is heard but the Major is shown, the son's voice is slightly muffled, to show that it is being heard through a closed door.
He even says, at the end of the speech "Open the door, Major -- I want to see your face. I want to know how you feel now."
But I also understand why it wasn't clear to you. What you thought you saw may have been due to the way the son was filmed -- head-on, fairly close, giving the impression that we are looking at him from the Major's POV. It even cuts back and forth between them, which is pretty common for editing a conversation between people in the same room.
It might have worked better to film him from the side at first, showing that he was standing at the closed and locked door, or have him rattle the doorknob or pound on the door again.
As for the original topic, the mysteriously opening interior door after the gunshot, I think it's purely a gaffe or re-edit that didn't get cut properly.
I find it hard to imagine a crew member accidentally opening that door, from the side where the actor was, so soon after the actor went through it. I also have a hard time imagining the director calling "cut" that soon. But I guess either is possible.
For anyone who hasn't watched it, theories that the door drifted open or opened from the Major's body falling against it are not valid -- the door opens toward the room he is in, we hear the doorknob/latch sound of it closing firmly, then being re-opened, and it starts to open quite quickly, clearly being pulled.
The typical suicide-in-film moment is there -- distraught person goes into a room, we are left staring at the closed door. But it is awfully short.
I'm wondering if the original scene was much longer. The son's monologue starts as if in the middle of a conversation, and the scene ends a bit choppily.
Perhaps the original edit showed the Major coming right back out for some reason, maybe to have a further confrontation with his son, brandishing a gun to chase him off (or something else he got from that room, to make his point or shame his son).
Maybe they planned to keep in the son's suicide after that confrontation, then have the Major finding him and committing suicide later. That would agree more with the book, and the son's suicide was in early versions of the script, according to the trivia section here.
Or maybe it was cut from a scene in which we would have seen the Major come out to the foyer with a gun, then go to the POV of the son on the doorstep again, so we and the son would hear the suicide shot through the exterior door.
Or even that the Major would respond to his son's last challenge, and let him see exactly how he felt now, by opening the exterior door and committing suicide in his son's view (hidden from us by camera angle, as in the lynching scene).
Maybe I'm talking out of my hat.
The idea that the opening door was deliberate/left in as some sort of symbolism is really far-fetched, to me -- it is a split-second, not nearly long enough for the "see? get it?" symbolism used in films. However it happened, the fact that it is left in is clearly a gaffe.
What is strange, to me, is that it would have been really easy to make the wait before the gunshot, and the time after it, longer, and never see that door opening.
After the Major closes the door, there is not one moving object in the shot. There is no pan in or out. It seems to me that few seconds of a freeze frame or slowing it down would have worked just fine, without the viewer noticing a thing (unless I'm missing something about the technology involved).
I think they just flat-out missed it, at least until it was too late to fix it.
And now I've spent way too much time thinking about it!
Here is the scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=s0ZzPo86_-k#t=4151s
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