House of Numbers (MGM, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 30) I watched an intriguing film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” show hosted by Eddie Muller: House of Numbers (1957), a truly weird semi-noir that cast Jack Palance in a dual role as Bill and Arnie Judlow, and Barbara Lang (who got an “introducing” credit but was hardly heard from again; she got a supporting role in Nicholas Ray’s Party Girl a year later but most of her subsequent credits were for series TV) as Arnie’s wife Ruth. The big gimmick is that Arnie, who was sentenced to a life term in San Quentin for beating up and nearly killing a man in a bar because he thought he was making a pass at Ruth, has hatched an elaborate escape plot that requires Bill’s participation. The gimmick is that Bill will break into San Quentin and take Arnie’s place while Arnie digs a tunnel to escape, and since the two look exactly alike (though Palance was a good enough actor he differentiated between the characters by giving Arnie more tousled hair and a different, more whispery voice), then can switch places inside the prison and no one, including the guards, will be the wiser. House of Numbers began as a novel, serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine before it was published as a book, by Jack Finney, who also wrote the source novel for Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was turned into a movie in 1957 by director Russell Rouse, who also co-wrote the script with Don M. Mankewicz. Rouse was always looking for “different” stories. In 1952 he’d made a film called The Thief, starring Ray Milland, and had made it without any dialogue, reverting not so much to the silent cinema as to what Sergei Eisenstein called “the sound film,” which would not use dialogue but would incorporate sound effects and recorded music to heighten the emotion. Though House of Numbers contains dialogue, it does have long wordless scenes featuring Jack Palance in one of his incarnations that are among the best parts of the film.

The film opens with a spectacular scene in which a prisoner pushes a guard off a balcony railing to the floor three stories below, and though we don’t know who these people are until much later, it turns out that the prisoner was Arnie Judlow and the guard was an anonymous drone who’s lying in a coma after the assault and it’s touch and go whether he’ll survive. Arnie is in a rush to escape after this incident because he knows that if the guard dies, it’ll mean an automatic death sentence for him. So he hatches the scheme in which his brother Bill and his wife Ruth will pose as a married couple and rent a house nearby San Quentin, only their next-door neighbor, Henry Nova (Harold J. Stone), is a guard at the prison and rather quickly figures it out when he catches Bill, impersonating Arnie, lighting a cigarette after a meal in the prison mess hall despite the prohibition against smoking, which Arnie would have known about but of which Bill was totally ignorant. Nova is actually the film’s most interesting character; he begins as just a hail-fellow-well-met sort of annoying neighbor, whom Bill and Ruth try to fend off because his innocent getting-to-know-you gestures might blow the whistle on the whole plot. Later he turns bad and attempts to blackmail Bill and Ruth after he figures out what they’re up to. House of Numbers, which my husband Charles and I had seen before in the 1990’s when I was still able to record TCM by the yard onto VHS tapes, is a quirky movie which seems to hold within it the seeds of a much stronger and more interesting film than the one we get. We’re told that Bill built an elaborate tree house for himself and Arnie when they were boys and Bill always wanted to be an architect but the family didn’t have the money to send both boys to college. So Arnie went instead, only to drop out after two years because he was good enough at boxing he wanted to try for a career as a professional prizefighter – only he flamed out after eight bouts, six of which he lost. That was one reason why he got a life sentence for a bar fight even though his opponent survived; since he’d fought professionally, the judge in his case ruled that his fists were “a deadly weapon” under the law.

We’re not sure just what Bill did for a living before Arnie recruited him to be his patsy, though it was presumably low-status enough that Bill was willing to give up whatever job he had to follow Arnie to California and join his escape plot. We also assume that Bill and Arnie are identical twins (after all, the same actor is playing both), though the dialogue tells us that Arnie is a year younger than Bill. According to Eddie Muller, House of Numbers was a major money-loser for MGM, though that’s hard to believe since the total budget was just over $1 million and it grossed $1.1 million. One of the things MGM did right was get permission to film the prison scenes inside the real San Quentin. The closing credits acknowledge California Corrections Department head Richard McGee and San Quentin warden Harley O. Teets (which sounds like a really silly name for someone in that job) for the rights to film there, while the on-screen warden is played by Edward Platt, billed third even though he’s barely in the movie until the end. Platt’s casting fits right in with his most famous roles as social worker Ray Framek in Rebel Without a Cause and the head of CONTROL in the TV James Bond spoof Get Smart. There’s also an incredible supporting performance by Timothy Carey as Arnie’s cellmate “Frenchy,” whose twitchy manner could well inspire someone to knock him off even if they hadn’t had to share the confined space of a prison cell with him. Eddie Muller also paid special tribute to the film’s veteran cinematographer, George Folsey, who’s part of the Academy’s Dishonor Roll in that he was nominated 13 times for Best Cinematography but never won a competitive Oscar (though he did win an Emmy Award for a TV special in 1958). He began as an errand boy for the Famous Players-Lasky studio (later Paramount) in 1913, got his first cinematography credit in 1919 for His Bridal Night, continued to shoot movies until 1972 (his iast credit is for Bone), and died in 1988.

Critics savaged House of Numbers on its initial release, calling the plot preposterous – which it is, though it’s also quite effectively done and it has an effective resolution when Warden Platt (we’re not told the character’s name, so I can call him that) flat-out tells Bill and Ruth that they need to turn Arnie in before he kills someone else and earns himself a trip to the gas chamber, and [spoiler alert!] Bill does so after realizing that Arnie has become a total psychopath and is likely to kill someone if he isn’t arrested and re-imprisoned first. Once again, there are hints of a more interesting movie here than the one that we actually see; I found myself expecting that Arnie would die in a shoot-out with the police and Bill and Ruth would end up together as a couple. It’s also an interesting story for Jack Finney in that, though it’s quite a different story from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (whose first film adaptation, directed by Don Siegel in 1956, is my choice for the first science-fiction film noir), it likewise turns on the whole question of identity and how well we truly know our associates and friends.