Robert Wise's The House on Telegraph Hill is an excellent film noir. It's filled with surprises and it manages to be sexy and scary and suspenseful. It is, in many ways, a kind of riff on Rebecca and Gaslight, but it has new things to say and new ways to say them! Valentina Cortesa is great, and Richard Basehart is magnetic and attractive and rather disarming. The whole thing is actually quite disarming. Robert Wise's films noirs from this period are excellent. And this one is made richer and much more interesting by its link to survivors from the genocide of European Jews. This is, in other words, a post-Expressionist noir that's in many ways about both its German aesthetic roots and its U.S. American criminal subject matter. I loved this.
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