The House on Telegraph Hill (Robert Wise, 1951)

Valentina Cortese and Richard Basehart in The House on Telegraph Hill

Cast: Valentina Cortese, Richard Basehart, William Lundigan, Fay Baker, Gordon Gebert, Steven Geray, Herb Butterfield, Natasha Lytess, Kei Thin Chung, John Burton, Katherine Meskill, Mario Siletti. Screenplay: Elick Moll, Frank Partos, based on a novel by Dana Lyon. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: John DeCuir, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Nick DeMaggio. Music: Sol Kaplan.

The key to a successful thriller is to keep the audience from asking those questions you're not supposed to ask: Why did X do that instead of that? What caused Y to act that way? Would a sane person really behave that way? And when the film ends, have all the loose threads been accounted for? The House on Telegraph Hill just barely manages to dodge those questions, except at the end. It's sometimes rather clumsily put together. For example, we are led to believe at the beginning that the film is being narrated in voiceover by the protagonist, Viktoria Kowalska (Valentina Cortese). But in mid-film we watch a conversation that Viktoria could not have overheard. We later find that the voiceover is actually Viktoria telling her story to investigators, but the momentary break in point of view is jarring. The ending, too, feels rushed. We have invested enough time in the story that we need a clearer outcome for Viktoria and others. The premise is a familiar one, given a postwar spin: A woman pretends to be someone she isn't and suffers the consequences. In Viktoria's case, she was a prisoner in the Belsen concentration camp, where she befriended Karin Dernakova (Natasha Lytess), who died there after telling Viktoria that she had a son who had been sent at the start of the war to live with her aunt in San Francisco. When the camp is liberated, Viktoria, who has no family of her own left in Poland, finds it expedient to assume the identity of Karin, whose papers she has been given for safekeeping. Viktoria is well-meaning; she doesn't really plan to defraud anyone, but through a rather rushed-through series of circumstances, she winds up in San Francisco pretending to be the mother of Karin's child, Chris (Gordon Gebert). Not only that, she also marries Chris's guardian, Alan Spender (Richard Basehart). So now she finds herself in an elegant mansion on the top of Telegraph Hill, playing mother to a boy who stands to inherit a fortune. And of course she also finds herself in danger. Cortese's performance makes some of this credible, but it was her only important film in America: She married her co-star, Basehart, and returned to Italy. He went with her, but except for Federico Fellini's La Strada (1954) and Il Bidone (1955), his European films were undistinguished, and he returned to the States after their divorce in 1960. The House on Telegraph Hill is plenty watchable, if only because of cinematographer Lucien Ballard's use of the San Francisco location.