Directed by Robert Wise. Written by Elick Moll and Frank Partos
Survivors and cutthroat social climbers collide in Robert Wise’s The House on Telegraph Hill, the story of how a concentration camp survivor steals the identity of a friend to secure herself passage to America and luxury.
Valentina Cortese is Victoria, whose story starts with woe. Her beautiful house in Poland is reduced to rubble by the Nazis, her husband killed by the same. She’s put into a camp where people squabble like rats over whatever gruel is fed to them, but she does make one friend: A woman who speaks of a son she smuggled out to America, her only ray of hope. Victoria vows she’ll keep them both alive long enough so they may go to the U.S. together. The woman dies a few days before liberation, and Victoria makes a fateful decision.
Who can blame her? The horrors Valentina has gone through are easy to imagine, but impossible to fully comprehend. Compared to some of the things she’s had to do to survive internment make this last act almost one of mercy, fulfilling a promise and becoming the mother a boy never had. Upon arriving, she enters a brisk romance with the boy’s guardian, and she moves into the big manor house atop a hill overlooking San Francisco. The high life! If it’s lonely at the top, it’s dangerous too, Victoria soon learns, as there doesn’t seem to be room for everyone in this old mansion and the wealth it represents.
The star of The House On Telegraph Hill is actually the house. Like Norma Desmond’s mansion in Sunset Boulevard, released one year prior, the house is a world unto itself. A colossus of expensive wood, its layout, furnishing and chambers are cast in sharp shadows, with everything else disappearing with the clicking shut of its front door. It’s rare you wish for all characters to be trapped inside a house, but this might be one of those times.
If the house is larger than life, then the characters of Wise’s film become just the living. Victoria and Alan, the boy’s guardian played by Richard Baseheart, both become tepid acquaintances as the story goes on, both pigeonholed into becoming something flatter and less evocative. Only Fay Baker as Margaret, the domineering nanny, is a hoot as she fully commits to overacting as an icepick-stiff judgmental observer of all.
The House On Telegraph Hill had the potential to be an all-time tale of the lengths a human being would go to never be at the mercy of others, but the hard edge it initially offers soon gives way to softer, more humane fare. Victoria didn’t get to San Francisco by the charity of others, so it’s disappointing when writers Moll and Partos clothe her in victimhood and make The House On Telegraph Hill a simpler story of a woman in peril, stripping Wise’s movie of the alluring psychological elements.
Maybe the horrors of the war were still too fresh to explore the possible outcome of the terrific trauma people like Victoria endured. Maybe it felt like too much to paint her as anything other than the victim than she always was. Regardless of the motivation, The House on Telegraph Hill becomes a forgettable affair, save the eponymous house, an extraordinary creation within whose walls occurs something considerably less so.
Mikkel Frederiksen 