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The House on Telegraph Hill
1951 |
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This mystery, which takes place in San Francisco, was originally turned down by Wise, who found the material uninspiring. Eventually, Darryl Zanuck, Twentieth Century Fox production head, convinced him to do the movie, even though Zanuck himself agreed that "it may not be the greatest story in the world."*
No one could put a stop to the love the film inspired for two of its stars, though: Richard Basehart and Valentina Cortesa married in 1951. |
The imposing Victorian house
on Telegraph Hill
overlooking San Francisco, where Victoria Kowelska once thought
she would find peace
and contentment, is now up for sale. Victoria begins her story
eleven years
earlier in 1939, when the German army left her beautiful home
near Warsaw,
Poland in ruins. Her husband died in the siege, and Vicky
became one of
thousands hoarded into concentration camps. At the camp at Belsen,
Germany,
Vicky becomes friends with another Pole, Karin Dernakova, a
sickly, frail
woman, who shares her life story with Vicky. Karin doubts that
she will ever
again see her son Christopher, whom she smuggled out of Poland
to the United
States just before the war began. After Vicky protects
Karin from another
prisoner's attempted theft, Karin invites her to San Francisco
to live with
her and Chris in the big house on the hill belonging to her
aunt Sophie, a
Polish noble who emigrated to the United States in 1904 to marry
a wealthy
shipbuilder. Karin dies three days before the camp is liberated.
As Karin
had not seen her aunt since she was a little girl, Vicky decides
to pose as
Karin. At a displaced persons camp, Vicky sends a cable to Sophie,
but
receives a reply from Joseph C. Callahan, an attorney in New
York, coldly
informing her that Sophie is dead. Although her hopes are now
nearly gone,
Vicky perserveres, and in 1950 reaches New York on a United
 Nations refugee
ship. At Callahan's office, she meets Alan Spender, a
relative of Aunt
Sophie by marriage, who adopted Chris after her death, believing
that Chris's
parents also had died. Callahan reveals that Sophie left
her valuable estate
to Chris, with Alan as guardian, and says he has doubts concerning
Vicky's
claim to be Karin. When Vicky vows to fight, Alan, admiring
her resolve,
invites her to dinner and during the next two weeks, woos her.
Feeling that
her best chance for safety is to be married to an American,
Vicky accepts
Alan's proposal and arrives in San Francisco as his wife.
Vicky soon
suspects that something is wrong in the house. Marc Bennett,
a senior partner
in the law firm representing the estate, recognizes Vicky as
a refugee he
questioned years earlier when he was in the army and offers
himself as a
friend. While playing catch with Chris, Vicky comes upon an
abandoned
playhouse that is damaged terribly. Vicky looks for Margaret,
Chris's
governess, to ask about the explosion and, not finding her in
her room,
starts to open a locked album, when Margaret discovers her.
Margaret says
coldly that Aunt Sophie gave her the album. During their subsequent
argument,
she calls Vicky an intruder. Vicky gives Margaret notice
to leave, but when
Alan returns home, he refuses to fire her. At the playhouse,
Vicky discovers
an extremely dangerous hole in the side and floor leading to
a steep drop to
a street below. Alan enters and as he chillingly questions
her, she backs up
in fear and falls through the hole, but he rescues her.
Although he tries to
comfort her, her suspicions about him increase. One day, as
Vicky prepares to
go with Chris to the store, Margaret stops them, saying that
Chris has
forgotten to clean his room. Vicky then leaves by herself,
and when she
steps on the brake while on a steep hill, she discovers she
cannot stop her
car. After narrowly avoiding other cars, she crashes into
a construction
site just in front of a wall leading to a steep drop below.
She calls Marc
and tells him that Alan tried to kill her and Chris so that
he would get
control of the estate. Marc doubts her, but promises to
investigate. He
confesses that he is in love with her, and she admits her real
identity.
Having seen Belsen himself, Marc understands her attempt to
grab a chance for
a better life, but feels that her own bad conscience has led
her to magnify
events into unwarranted suspicions about Alan. Later, while
home alone, Vicky
pries open the album in Margaret's room and finds a newspaper
obituary for
Aunt Sophie stating that the death occurred a few days after
the date of the
cable sent to her in 1945. Alan surprises her, and later
that night, he
removes the phone off the hook in the library. In the bedroom,
Alan fixes a
glass of orange juice for Vicky. When she starts to return to
the library for
a book, he goes instead, then, on returning to the bedroom,
he encourages her
to drink the juice. When she says that earlier it tasted
bitter, he pours
himself a glass from the pitcher and drinks it, then says it
tastes fine and
she drinks hers. Vicky accuses him of killing Aunt Sophie, in
addition to
trying to kill her and Chris. Alan then admits that he has been
hoarding
doses of a sedative that the doctor has prescribed for Margaret's
insomnia
and has put all of it into her glass of orange juice.
Aghast, Vicky informs
Alan that he has drunk the contaminated juice himself; when
he left to get
her book, she poured herself a different glass and poured the
juice from the
first glass back into the pitcher. Now sweating profusely,
Alan tells
Margaret that Vicky has poisoned him and asks her to call for
a doctor,
explaining that the receiver in the library is off the hook.
When Alan
admits trying to kill Chris in the car, but says he did it so
they could be
together like old times, Margaret, who loves the boy, coldly
informs him the
line is dead. When the police arrive, Alan is dead. Vicky tries
to defend
Margaret for not calling a doctor, but the police plan to take
her away for
questioning. When they find Chris absent from his room,
Vicky fears Margaret
has left with him, but they discover her watching over the boy
as he sleeps
in her room. Vicky offers to be a witness for her, but
Margaret replies that
her conscience will be her witness. Marc takes Vicky and
Chris away from the
house to his mother's house, but before leaving she goes to
Aunt Sophie's
portrait. Marc says Aunt Sophie would approve, and Vicky
replies that all
she can do is thank her for everything.
From the AFI Catalog of Feature Films
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 93 min. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.;
Distributed by: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.;
Directed by: Robert Wise;
Produced by: Robert Bassler;
Screenplay by: Elick Moll & Frank Partos;
Edited by: Nick De Maggio;
Director of Photography: Lucien Ballard;
Music by: Sol Kaplan;
Production Design by: Lyle Wheeler;
Sound by: George Leverett;
Costumes by: Renie;
Make-up by: Sol Kaplan.
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Richard Basehart (Alan Spender), Valentina
Cortesa
(Victoria Kowelska), William Lundigan (Major
Marc Bennett),
Fay Baker (Margaret), Gordon Gebert (Chris),
Kei Thing Chung
(Kei, houseboy), Steve Geray (Dr. Burkhardt),
Herbert Butterfield
(Joseph C. Callahan), John Burton (Mr. Whitmore),
Katherine
Meskill (Mrs. Whitmore), Mario Siletti (Tony),
Charles Wagenheim
(Man at accident), David Clarke (Mechanic),
Tamara Schee
(Maria), Natasha Lytess (Karin Dernakova),
Ashmead Scott
(Inspector Hardy), Tom McDonough (Farrell),
Henry Rowland
(Sergeant-Interpreter), Les O'Pace (UNRA sergeant),
Don Kohler
(Chemist), Harry Carter (Detective Ellis),
Spencer Chan
(Chinese cook), Mari Young (Chinese singer),
Jeffrey Sayre
(Police stenographer), Roger McGee (G.I.),
Eugene Porcheur
(Pole), Florence Buzby, Glen Walters, Margaret
Masters, Sonia
Charsky, Eleanor Moore, and Jeraldine Jordan.
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