There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

The House on Telegraph Hill is directed by Robert Wise and adapted for the screen by Elick Moll & Frank Partos from the novel The Frightened Child written by Dana Lyon. It stars Richard Baseheart, Valentina Cortese, William Lundigan & Fay Baker. Filmed on location primarily in the Telegraph Hill area of San Francisco, the film features photography by Lucien Ballard and a musical score directed by Alfred Newman.Victoria Kowelska (Cortese) survives Belsen, but with her family killed by the Nazis she is all alone in the world with no identity. With her Belsen friend Karin Dernakova (Natasha Lytess) not surviving till liberation, Victoria decides to take on Karin's identity to get to America. Under the guise of being Karin, Victoria winds up in San Francisco, living in a prime mansion, married to Dernakova trustee Alan Spender (Baseheart), mother to young Chris (Gordon Gebert) and heiress to the family fortune. But the House on Telegraph Hill is home to many secrets and unanswered questions: Can Alan be trusted? Why is Margaret (Baker) the housekeeper cold towards her? What really brought about the death of the recently deceased aunt? And can she even trust her only real friend, Major Marc Bennett (Lundigan)?Director Robert Wise was one of the most versatile men to have ever worked in cinema . He pretty much covered all genres in his long and distinguished career, here for The House on Telegraph Hill, he blends Gothic melodrama with film noir leanings. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction (Wheeler, DeCuir, Little & Fox), the film is certainly a lavish enough production, and for sure the story is well elaborated, but the picture as a whole is not all that it can be. For although it's rich with an eerie ambiance that's occasionally punctured by the promise of some sinister intervention, it never delivers on its promises. The suggestions and heightened tensions grab the attention, but the screenplay doesn't allow the woman in danger scenario room to grow. None of which is helped by the fact that the film opens with Victoria narrating her flashback in past-tense voice over! It's hardly a smart move by the makers that, is it? Perhaps it's wrong to judge it as being part of the group that contains, Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Gaslight (1940/1944) and The Spiral Staircase (1946)? But fact remains it's a long way from being half as good as any of those films.However, there is still enough in Wise's film to keep it above average and make it a safe recommendation to fans of the "woman-in-mansion-in-peril" sub-genre. The story is well played by the principal actors. Baseheart has to play his cards close to his chest in the tricky role that requires him to keep us guessing as to if he is good or bad. That he offers no clues is testament to the good performance Baseheart gives. Italian actress Cortese binds the film together with a layered performance that contains excellent visual acting, where nervous smiles and saddened eyes tell of guilt and longing that the screenplay has sadly not let the character expand upon. Baker is a touch underwritten, but does a neat line in icy cold veneer, while Lundigan offers up a nice counterpoint as the other man in Victoria's life. Having Lucien Ballard on cinematography is a good move. Be it capturing the expansive colour vistas for Budd Boetticher & Sam Peckinpah in Westerns, or shooting in atmospherically stark black & white for the likes of John Brahm & Jacques Tourneur, Ballard showed himself to be a master photographer. Here in the brooding Dernakova mansion he deals in shadows and low lights to great tonal effect. Alfred Newman's (a record 9 time Academy Award winner) score, aided by Sol Kaplan, is very dramatic and flows freely around the house and is at one with Victoria's various emotional states.The House on Telegraph Hill contains menacing undertones that are boosted by camera, music and acting. If only the writing was in tune with those things then we would be talking about a classic of its type. 6.5/10

The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)A very solid movie with a bit of a forced hand, and something like a familiar plot in new clothes. The key innovation is that it ties the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp to a conventional American melodrama, and has the lead woman taking on the identity of her best friend in the camps. It is filmed with precision and drama all the way through, and makes a visually strong statement, as well as one with the social message that the adjustments of Nazi victims and their survivors is really hard to fathom. It kludges along a little with a narrative fix to make the information clear and fast at the start, and get us to San Francisco, 1950.The leading character, played by Italian actress Valentina Cortese (though she might well be intended to be a Polish Jew, given her situation in the camp), is very strong, a somewhat awkward leading woman but different than some of the types populating post-war movies. I liked her increasingly, and her difference (as an actress) helps cement her difference (as a character) from her American friends. She deserves our sympathy, and overall she gets it. Oddly, that element of surviving a death camp six years after the liberation of a string of them in Europe from the Nazis, becomes less and less salient, so that when the woman's duplicity is brought up toward the end, the growing male protagonist brushes it off as just one of those things. He's right, really, but the fact that the woman returns and has to pretend to be a young boy's real mother is tough going, if you consider something like the truth of it. It's convenient that the surrogate mother figure, who has apparently done a pretty good job raising the kid, is also a meanie in good Hollywood caricaturing style. The other man in the story, the one who you expect to be on our leading lady's side, turns out to be weak, duplicitous, and a bit of pretty wash by the end.Robert Wise is one of those smart directors who seems to make something unique happen no matter what the material. And the odd angles to this story, even with the inevitable outcome, make it really good.

The interesting American career of Italian actress Valentina Cortese met a high point here, in one of her best known films. The next year, she gave an even better performance in SECRET PEOPLE (1952, see my review), but here she is also excellent. Here she plays a Polish woman (whereas in SECRET PEOPLE she is Italian), presumably based upon the theory that one foreign accent sounds like any other to the Americans, and with those exquisitely sensitive eyes she might as well be Polish, indeed from anywhere she says, because we believe her. The story commences in the grim surroundings of Belsen, where she and a woman friend are imprisoned by the Nazis. Her friend dies three days before the American liberators arrive, and Valentina assumes her identity because at least the friend has a son in America, while she has no one and nothing left, and anyway she speaks English with an Italian accent so that's OK then. This eventually leads her as a displaced person to New York, where she meets an intimidating lawyer and the sinister Richard Basehart, who is guardian of 'her' young son, who is named Chris and lives in a big mansion on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. The American Major who interrogated Valentina at Belsen turns up at a party, as American Majors do in films, especially when they are played by handsome and reliable William Lundigan, and she turns to him for help because she is becoming worried by Richard Basehart, who married her as soon as he saw her in New York, and she soon realizes it was really to secure his position in control of the large family fortune. Yes, the story is pretty far-fetched. Robert Wise does his usual superior job of directing, but this script needs more than that. Despite the fact that this film is largely set on Telegraph Hill, it is not one of those hills which is alive with the sound of music. There is a playhouse at the bottom of the garden with a big hole in the floor through which one can fall 300 feet to one's death. It has been sitting there like that for four years 'since the explosion'. For such a large and carefully-kept mansion with a Chinese butler, there is a distinct shortage of maintenance in the garden despite its impeccably cut lawn! Naturally, Valentina falls down the hole when she is cornered there by Basehart, but he grabs her hands and saves her from death. But that is only a temporary respite, for there is the poisoned orange juice to come. Oh, but between those two events, there is the brake fluid drained from the car. And you know how steep those San Francisco hills are without brake fluid. She is saved by a pile of construction sand onto which she lands when the car crashes and she is thrown out. Everything about this story is perfectly natural and happens every day. Valentina loves 'the feel of silk on my skin again' after her sufferings at Belsen, and she has a very sweet nature, but there is a creepy woman named Margaret in the house (played by the eerily forbidding Fay Baker) who is very possessive of the little boy Chris, whose only interest appears to be baseball and is played by a child actor named Gordon Gebert who has a rather annoying voice and is badly handled on screen. Robert Wise had clearly not learned the art of directing children yet. The tension mounts as we slowly climb the Telegraph Hill of this story, and the tale becomes increasingly Gothic and less and less convincing. Will Valentina, who survived Belsen, also be able to survive Basehart's machinations to do her in and have the money to himself? It is very much touch and go and I ain't sayin'.

If Daphne Du Maurier had set REBECCA in 1950s San Francisco, it might very well resemble this uptight, highly unusual noir from Robert Wise. Valentina Cortese plays a concentration camp survivor who steals the identity of a dead woman and insinuates herself into the life of Richard Basehart (who happens also to be the guardian of the dead woman's son)...it's absurd and over-the-top but also topflight entertainment. Cortese is terrific, slowly falling apart as she realizes the mistake she's made. Basehart is fine if a bit bland...although the lighting toward the end makes him appear very menacing. Fay Baker makes a very good Mrs. Danvers-like caretaker. Wise is a fine director and he keeps things moving at a pretty brisk clip. He also stages a now classic out of control car crash with Cortese (or at least a stunt Cortese) at the wheel.