The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) - film review

When the Nazis invade her native Poland during WWII, Victoria Kowelska is arrested and sent to a concentration camp.  There, she makes a friend in Karin de Nakova, a woman who is too weak to survive the ordeal of the camp.  After the war, Victoria decides to take Karin’s place, knowing that she has wealthy relatives in America.  On her arrival in San Francisco, she is informed that, after the death of Karin’s only remaining close relative, the entire family wealth has passed to Karin’s infant son Chris.  In Karin’s absence, Chris has been reared by a distant relative, Alan Spender, and an overly protective housekeeper, Margaret.  Karin is surprised when Alan proposes to her but the couple marry and are soon installed in the grand family house on Telegraph Hill.  Karin remains fearful that her identity will be discovered, but she soon realises that those around her also have their secrets.   She becomes convinced that someone intends to kill her...

Director Robert Wise is best known for his lavish film musicals, such as West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965), but even the most fleeting of glances at his filmography will reveal a filmmaker of extraordinary range and versatility.  He directed the memorable horror film The Curse of the Cat People (1944), the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), the first Star Trek film, and much more besides.  The House On Telegraph Hill is one of his less well-known films, a noir-style suspense thriller which feels like a canny conflation of two Hitchcock’s films, Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941).   Initially, Wise was reluctant to direct the film, an adaptation of a popular novel by Dana Lyon, and did so only at the insistence of his boss, Darryl F. Zanuck.

The House On Telegraph has plenty of Hitchcockian touches but it is far more than  a slavish imitation of Hitchcock.  Although the film begins slowly, with a sombre prologue that reminds us of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, the pace soon picks up and builds gradually to an excruciatingly tense and chilling climax.  A well-honed screenplay, Wise’s subtle direction and the strong central performances from Richard Basehart and Valentina Cortese (who married in the year this film was made) make this a compelling thriller.  The film’s real strength lies in its imaginative camerawork and atmospheric art direction.  These contribute a mood of tightening oppression and escalating paranoia as experienced by the main character, who sees her world gradually transform itself into a living nightmare, from which death may well be the only escape.

© James Travers 2009

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