The House on Telegraph Hill
Tags: murder

Plot synopsis:
Polish woman Viktoria Kowalska (Valentina Cortese) has lost her home and her husband in the German occupation of Poland, and has been imprisoned in the concentration camp at Belsen. She befriends another prisoner, Karin Dernakova (Natasha Lytess), who dreams of reuniting with her young son Christopher (Gordon Gebert), who was sent to live in San Francisco with a wealthy Aunt. Karin dies shortly before the camp can be liberated, and Viktoria, seeing a way to a better life, uses Karin's papers to assume her identity. After the camp is liberated, she is interviewed by Major Marc Bennett (William Lundigan), who gets her a place in a camp for persons displaced by the war. She writes to Karin's Aunt Sophia in San Francisco, but receives a cable from Sophia's lawyers that she has died.
Four years later, Viktoria (still going by the name of Karin) is able to travel to New York, where she meets with Christopher's guardian Alan Spender (Richard Basehart), a distant relative of Sophia's. "Karin" intends to gain custody of "her" son, but it becomes clear that Sophia has left her fortune to Christopher when he comes of age. When she realizes that Alan is attracted to her, she realizes that it will be easier to stay in America if she has an American husband. She allows him to romance her, and they soon marry. Alan takes Karin to San Francisco where Christopher meets his "mother" for the first time, and she settles into Sophia's Italianate mansion on Telegraph Hill, where Christopher has lived with Alan and his governess, Margaret (Fay Baker).
Things seem idyllic at first, but tensions begin to mount between Karin and Margaret, who has not only raised Christopher but is also in love with Alan, and resents Karin for intruding on her life. Karin is also alarmed at the presence of a burnt-out, dangerously damaged playhouse overlooking the hill, which Christopher claims to have damaged with an explosion from his toy chemistry set. He and Margaret beg her not to tell Alan, since Margaret never has, but Karin is perplexed to discover that he already knows about it. Karin is pleased, however, to meet Marc Bennett again, learning he is an old schoolmate of her husband's and is a partner for the law firm that handles Sophia's affairs. He is clearly attracted to Karin, but keeps a respectable distance.
Karin investigates the playhouse, but is surprised by Alan while she is in there and nearly falls to her death through a hole in the floor. Alan pulls her up, but appears to be alarmed by her behavior. Soon after, the brakes on Karin's car fail. She escapes unharmed but suspects Margaret of tampering with the car. When she realizes Christopher was supposed to have been in the car with her, Karin comes to believe that Alan is behind the accident, since if Christopher dies Alan will inherit Sophia's money. With Marc's help she begins to investigate, learning that Marc's law firm, which supposedly sent her the cable regarding Sophia's death, has no record of the cable being sent. She also grows significantly more nervous around Alan.
Karin discovers a newspaper clipping in Margaret's scrapbook confirming that the cable was sent three days before Sophia's death: it is a fake, and Alan killed Sophia. She attempts to call Marc but is prevented from doing so when Alan arrives home, and he does not let her out of his sight for the rest of the evening. When he brings in the orange juice that the pair drink every night before bed, she is sure her glass has been poisoned. When he briefly leaves the room, she attempts to call the police, but Alan left the phone off the hook in another room, and calls cannot be made. He returns to the bedroom and coerces her into drinking the orange juice, after which he drinks his own. Thinking himself safe, he confesses to Sophia's murder, and that he has given her an overdose of sedatives in her orange juice. Karin tells him she has switched the glasses and that he has poisoned himself. She tries to telephone a doctor but can't get through. Margaret is awakened by the commotion, and Alan begs her to call a doctor. Realizing that he has tried to kill Christopher as well as Sophia and Karin, she refuses, and Alan dies.
Margaret is arrested for refusing to aid Alan, and it is indicated that she may be charged with his murder. Karin, who has confessed her true identity to Marc, leaves the house with him and Christopher to begin a new life.

Review: This movie begins a little like William Irish's aka Cornell Woolrich's " I married a dead man " (the novel was released well before Leisen's movie ,in 1948),the concentration camps replacing the derailment:and then a poor girl becomes an impostor in a wealthy family;then after introducing a Rebeccaesque governess,the story takes a divergent turn ,recalling sometimes "gaslight" "suspicion" (the glass of orange juice replacing the glass of milk) and "sudden fear" which would be released the following year.That said,the movie is good,suspenseful,sometimes excellent and shows how great Robert Wise is as a director when he creates a disturbing atmosphere in an old house;he would take his skill to its absolute perfection with "the haunting" (1963) IMHO the best movie ever made about a haunted house (the remake should be carefully avoided);his talent emerges here and there: the playhouse where a wall is missing,the branch behind the curtain,the shadow on Valentina Cortese's white dress in the garage and the picture of the late old lady who seems like a judge beyond the grave ;her expressive face seems to have changed in the last pictures .Best performance comes from Richard Baseheart who shines in his last minutes on screen and the rest of the cast rises to the occasion..
Valentina Cortesa is excellent and very believable as the lady who makes her way from the concentration camps to the house on Telegraph Hill.
In the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, the Polish Victoria Kowelska (Valentina Cortesa) has lost her husband and family in the war.
Karin dies three days before the liberation forces commanded by Major Marc Bennett (William Lundigan) arrive at the camp and Victoria assumes the identity of her friend to emigrate to the United States.
The movie has an impressive scene when Victoria's car loses the break on the hills of San Francisco.
Valentina Cortese and Richard Basehart star in "The House on Telegraph Hill," a 1951 film also starring William Lundigan.
Cortese plays a concentration camp survivor, Victoria Kowelska, who takes the identity of her dead friend and travels to San Francisco to claim the woman's son, who is living with an aunt, and also her inheritance.
She finally confides in the Army officer who processed her papers (Lundigan).Robert Wise does a good job with this suspenser, which combines some diverse elements - hidden identity, romance, shady nanny and a murder plot - though the script isn't the best.
A woman (Valentina Cortesa) assumes the identity of her more affluent friend who died at the Belsen camp in Germany.
I can also see why Basehart fell for her in real life.The San Francisco locations make a good open air contrast to the dark mansion interiors that dominate the characters.
A young woman who survives the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen (Valentina Cortese) assumes the identity of her friend, who died at the camp, and through the new identity inherits a mansion in San Francisco on Telegraph Hill.
Robert Wise directed this drama(not a haunted house thriller!) that stars Valentina Cortesa as Victoria Kowelska , a Nazi concentration camp survivor who swaps identities with her deceased friend in order to escape her dire situation.
She eventually ends up in San Francisco, at the woman's home, trying to bond with the son, who is now in the custody of Alan Spender(played by Richard Basehart) with whom she falls in love.
Interesting film with a compelling(if contrived) plot, and most appealing San Francisco locations, especially the beautiful title house..
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.
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.
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.
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.
Valentina takes a chance and gets from the frying-pan into the fire, but in a completely different world - from the atrocious misery of concentration camps to webs of intrigue in the riches and luxuries of high society in California.Robert Wise was always one of the most reliable of directors, while he never repeated himself - it's astounding how different the character of every one of his films is from all the others.
Concentration camp survivor Victoria Kowelska finds herself involved in mystery, greed, and murder when she assumes the identity of a dead friend in order to gain passage to America.Parts of the film - including the runaway car scene - were shot on location in the Telegraph Hill area of San Francisco.
This was the location of the longtime Telegraph Hill restaurant called Julius' Castle, which closed its doors in 2008 after operating for 84 years.I love San Francisco as a movie backdrop.
It opens with Valentina Cortese in a Nazi concentration camp, and she manages to get to the states by posing as her dead friend, who just HAPPENS to be heir to a huge house and fortune in san francisco.
Pretty standard woman-in-peril film raised a notch or two above the average by high production values and taut direction by Robert Wise.Valentina Cortesa plays a woman who is released from a concentration camp and takes on the identity of a woman who died in the camp.
She uses this new identity as a ticket to America, marries Richard Basehart and assumes the mother role to the son the dead woman left behind.
Mostly, the plot is straightforward, and we know Cortesa will get out of everything o.k., just not exactly how.The film has the look of a film noir, heightened by the San Francisco atmosphere, but it's really more of a conventional suspense thriller than a true noir.
The interesting American career of Italian actress Valentina Cortese met a high point here, in one of her best known films.
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.
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.
A concentration camp survivor assumes the identity of a wealthy woman who dies on her way to America.
There's even a scene involving a glass of juice that is reminiscent of the glass of milk in "Suspicion," and the maid played by Baker is like Judith Anderson in "Rebecca." There are good performances from Cortese as the woman who comes to regret her get rich quick scheme and Basehart as her sinister husband; the two actors married during the filming..
The House On Telegraph Hill is both the title of this film and the goal of refugee Valentina Cortese.
So she takes the identity of a friend who died there who happened to be Polish nobility and who married into a wealthy American family from San Francisco.
Her only friend is William Lundigan who was a major in the army and whom she dealt with coincidentally, a little too coincidentally for my taste in the displaced persons camp after World War II.That and the fact that an incredibly stupid error on one of the protagonists parts trips up the scheme are what bars The House On Telegraph Hill.
It's also a fine object lesson in the ways in which, despite their endless repertoire of half-clever tricks, they inevitably they make fatal mistakes which topple them fall into the traps they so carefully set for others.Richard Basehart makes you want to bash his face, in The House on Telegraph Hill.
It opens in the shambles of war-torn Europe, where a Displaced Person from Poland (Valentina Cortesa, sometimes "Cortese") has assumed the papers and identity of a close friend who died in the camps.
Cortesa travels to America to claim the son  and, incidentally, the inheritance  as her own.The estate's trustee (Richard Basehart) sweeps her off her feet and soon they're ensconced in the Gothic pile overlooking San Francisco and the Bay. But  shades of Rebecca!
Finally she reaches out to a acquaintance (William Lundigan) who happens to be the Army officer who processed her papers in Germany.The surprising Robert Wise has a knack for papering over holes, keeping us from wondering what the one plot  the stolen identity  has to do with the other  the standard-issue woman-in-distress (or `jep').
"The House On Telegraph Hill" (1951) was based on Dana Lyon's 1948 novel "The Frightened Child" and although it incorporates many of the characteristics of its predecessors, its story of deception, murder and avarice includes enough suspense and interesting plot twists to keep it totally gripping and entertaining throughout.During the Nazi invasion of Poland in World War 11, Victoria Kowelska (Valentina Cortese) loses her family and her home before being imprisoned in Belsen concentration camp.
She settles in quickly and after being introduced to Chris as his mother, gets to know him as they play ball together.Victoria's surprised when Marc Bennett (William Lundigan) visits her new home as a family friend and a member of Aunt Sophie's legal firm because they'd met previously when, as a Major in the U.S. Army, he'd interviewed her at Belsen immediately after the camp had been liberated.
The circumstances lead her to believe that Alan and Margaret are trying to kill both her and Chris and then, when she discovers some documents that point to Alan's involvement in Aunt Sophie's death, she shares her suspicions with Marc, but this doesn't bring an end to her ordeal.This movie's story is narrated in flashback by Victoria who's an extremely sympathetic character but also an impostor and identity thief who practises a deception in order to acquire wealth and a lifestyle to which she isn't entitled.
A most interesting movie in the Fox film noir range is House on Telegraph Hill.
And I enjoyed the brief café glimpse of Chinese singer, Mari Young, who renders the opera ballad, "Lover's Broken Dream", accompanied by Gew Wong on the butterfly harp, Lung Wong (Chinese banjo) and Lee Wong (two-string violin).In short, House on Telegraph Hill fulfills two essential noir requirements: (1) The prevailing mood, both photographically and story-wise is dark; (2) the central character is not only threatened and in danger, but finds herself in a situation from which it seems impossible to escape..
I've seen this kind of story many times: the frightened wife fearing her husband was going to kill her, most people not believing this, and a dramatic ending in the final minutes after long, drawn-out scenes building suspense.
Now how about something actually happening?" Nothing much did until the final minutes, with the exception of a very short automobile scene.The first part is the most interesting, when we see how the "heroine" of the story, "Victoria Kowelska" (Valentina Cortese) makes it to America to take the place of another woman in San Francisco.
Most of her fine film career has been done in Italy.I did enjoy the two main male actors, too, Richard Basehart and William Lundigan, but they were nothing super, playing routine roles.
Great lighting always makes these houses, with the long stairways, look Gothic and foreboding, especially in black-and-white photography.For those who see the title and read the "previews" and thus, are excepting more of a film noir, or even a thriller with horror overtones, consider yourself warned.
She might as well be who she claims to be.Anyway, with her new identity, she returns to a Gothic house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco that she has inherited from a deceased aunt.
The House on Telegraph Hill is a wonderfully entertaining thriller dealing with a woman living under an assumed identity and the child she claims as her own.
Overall, The House on Telegraph Hill is a very nice, under-seen film..
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Flash Review)Sharing many similarities to Hitchcock's Suspicion as well as Notorious, this was a beautifully shot film about a woman who assumes the identity of a friend who died while they were both in a NAZI concentration camp.
Everyone seems to like Valentina Cortese's performance, and while she's believable as a wide-eyed concentration camp survivor arriving in America, it's Richard Basehart who steals the show.
'The House on Telegraph Hill' (1951) Starring Valentina Cortese and Richard Basehart.
'The House on Telegraph Hill' was directed by the usually very talented Robert Wise.I did like this film and it's worth seeing, however, I couldn't help thinking how much better it may have been if directed by the master of suspense 'Alfred Hitchcock'.
The acting talent was all there, something else was missing.It's interesting to note that the two leads Valentina Cortese and Richard Basehart met making this movie and were soon married.
You see, that new life involves the estate of a wealthy San Francisco matron, now deceased, and when Cortesa marries the guardian of her late friend's young son, she piles on the intrigue as she begins to suspect that he (Richard Basehart) and their housekeeper (Fay Baker) are trying to kill her.The house on Telegraph Hill is a spooky old San Francisco mansion that looks as if it survived the 1906 earthquake that devastated the rest of the city, but has begun to die a slow death.
Victoria (Valentina Cortese) is a Polish concentration camp inmate when the film begins.
This was one of several more or less ho-hum features that Robert Wise directed between The Set-Up and Somebody Up There Likes Me. In some ways it's a prototype of Dial M For Murder with a would-be murder victim wife (Valentina Cortese) turning to family friend (William Lundigan) when she suspects her husband (Richard Basehart) is attempting to administer poison where it will do the most good.
As "Karin" she makes her way to the Telegraph Hill area of San Francisco where she meets Karin's young son Christopher who accepts her as his mother.
She meets Karin's only other surviving American relation, her cousin Alan Spender, who starts paying court to her, and the two are eventually married."The House on Telegraph Hill" is sometimes described as a film noir, but like another reviewer I feel that it does not quite fit that description as it lacks a number of common noir characteristics such as chiaroscuro photography, a complex plot and an atmosphere of moral ambiguity.
Each of those films has as its main character a woman who has reason to suspect her husband of murder or attempted murder; here Victoria comes to believe (with good reason) that Alan is trying to kill both her and Christopher.
(Unlike Hitchcock, the director Robert Wise was not a specialist in thrillers, but worked in a variety of different genres; his best-known films today are probably the musicals "West Side Story" and "The Sound of Music").
The device of having Victoria assume another woman's identity does not really come off; little in the rest of the film hangs on the fact that she is an impostor, and the plot would not have been significantly different if the real Karin Dernakova had returned to San Francisco after surviving her ordeal in Belsen.
At the end of WWII, Victoria Kowelska(Valentina Cortese)survives a Nazi death camp and assumes the identity of her friend Karin, who died with her papers and picture of her young son clutched in her hand.
Victoria's new identity will have her going to a family estate in San Francisco to be with her 'new' son Christopher(Gordon Gebert)and being romanced by his guardian Alan Spender(Richard Basehart).