House by the River (1950)
Directed by Fritz Lang

Film Review

Whilst they are all too easily overlooked, the films that Fritz Lang made during his stint in Hollywood represent some of the director's best work and provide a pleasing continuation of his early expressionistic masterpieces.  House by the River is one of Lang's most chilling and technically accomplished films of this era, an atmospheric crime drama that skilfully combines the aesthetics of 1940s American film noir thriller (at its best) with Gothic melodrama.  The shadow-laden sets, satanically eerie score and moody high-contrast black and white photography serve to create a sustained impression of menace and paranoia, attaining jolts of sublime terror at the story's most dramatic moments.  Whilst the plot is ludicrous in parts (the denouement is laughably contrived but shockingly effective), Lang's direction is never less than flawless throughout and the film is easily one of his most disturbing and compelling contributions to the art of cinema.

As in Lang's previous two great films, The Woman in the Window (1944) and Secret Beyond the Door (1948), House by the River succeeds because it goes way beyond the clunking mechanics of its B-movie plot and takes us deep into the troubled mind of the main protagonist, this time a megalomaniac writer who is incapable of restraining his baser impulses.  Louis Hayward's portrayal of the writer is gloriously lacking in subtlety, but the way that Lang films him and slices up the action (inserting cut-away shots that have something of the ferocity of a knife attack) give him a heightened reality and menace.  Stephen Byrne is not merely a wicked, self-absorbed opportunist; he is someone who is entirely at the mercy of events, as incapable of controlling his destructive impulses as he is at determining the course of events once he has committed the cardinal crime of murder.  The river that runs past his house is not only central to the plot, it is also a potent visual metaphor for the psychological and moral forces that will propel him to his doom.  Throw a dead body into a river and of course it will return to condemn you. 

It is interesting that Lang had originally envisaged casting a black actress for the part of the murder victim, but was forced to abandon the idea by over-cautious studio executives.  Whilst this was undoubtedly a missed opportunity, the film still has a profound resonance with the McCarthy anti-Communist paranoia that was sweeping America at the time, most visibly in the slightly comical trial scene in which an innocent man (the murderer's crippled brother) is accused by an embittered servant (the parallel with the courtroom scene in Arthur Miller's The Crucible is striking).  The playfulness of the trial sequence distracts from what it is really saying about contemporary America, namely the mania for finding easy scapegoats for the country's social and economic ills.  House by the River is not only a darkly compelling study in mental derangement - a companion piece to Lang's early sound masterpiece M (1931) - it is also a subtle and damning piece of political commentary on America in the early 1950s.

Film Synopsis

Stephen Byrne, a young American writer who is keen to make a name for himself, lives with his wife Marjorie in a house set on the banks of a river.  One afternoon, whilst his wife is away visiting friends, Stephen makes advances towards his attractive servant, Emily, but accidentally strangles her when she protests.  His brother John turns up unexpectedly and reluctantly agrees to help Stephen dispose of the body in the river.  John is disgusted when his brother attempts to capitalise on Emily's mysterious disappearance to promote his next book but he unwittingly becomes the prime suspect when the dead woman's body is discovered.  Fearing that his brother will betray him, Stephen decides to arrange his suicide...