Monday, Jun. 18, 1951
Also Showing
The Long Dark Hall (Cusick International; United Artists) is a long, dark movie about an erring husband (Rex Harrison) who blunders his way to the edge of the gallows. Finding his paramour murdered in her room, Harrison runs home in a panic, burns his bloodstained suit, lies to the police and spends most of the film being badgered by a prosecutor. Harrison's wife, played appealingly by Lilli Palmer, has two grisly scenes with the actual murderer (Anthony Dawson), a beady-eyed psychopath. But Directors Anthony Bushell and Reginald Beck are so entranced with brooding, shadowy photography that most of the film appears to have been shot at the bottom of a well.
Sealed Cargo (RKO Radio), a low-voltage drama of the high seas, pits some hapless Nazis against steel-jawed Dana Andrews, probably the most talkative down-Easter ever to ship out of Gloucester. Headed for the Newfoundland fishing banks, Andrews is still trying to sort out the spies among his crew when he comes across a disabled mother ship for German U-boats disguised as a Danish schooner.
He tows his prize into a remarkably primitive Canadian port (though it has electricity, there is no communication with the outside world), where he and the natives briskly dispose of several dozen heavily armed Nazis, blow up the schooner and a brace of submarines. In the story of a war which seems almost nostalgically simple these days, Claude Rains is selfconsciously Prussian as the head villain and Carla Balenda does her best to look decorative as the unnecessary heroine.
The House on Telegraph Hill (20th Century-Fox) suggests that a woman who survived the horrors of Belsen could be unhinged by a pair of scheming San Franciscans. Though the script struggles manfully to prove the point, it winds up as just another pretentious Hollywood excursion into psychology.
Valentina Cortesa, borrowing the identity of a dead fellow Pole in the concentration camp, comes to the U.S. to claim her friend's child and fortune. She marries the boy's guardian and moves with him to the house on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill, where the boy and his ice-blonde governess are already installed. Soon Valentina is asking herself a familiar Hollywood question: "Is my husband trying to kill me?"
Since he narrowly misses pushing her off a cliff and tampers with the brakes on her car, she concludes that he is. However, sturdy William Lundigan, a new-found ally, won't believe her until the last minute, which provides a handy excuse for postponing the moment when Valentina can safely fall into her savior's arms.
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