The House on Telegraph Hill (20th Century-Fox, 1951)

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

Last night (October 24, 2026) my husband Charles and I watched a bizarre and ultimately unsatisfying film from 1951 called The House on Telegraph Hill on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” on Turner Classic Movies, though for some reason they didn’t show Muller’s usual intro and outro but went right into the film itself, and right out of it again once it ended. Directed by Robert Wise and written by Elick Moll and Frank Partos from a 1948 novel called The Frightened Child by Dana Lyon (her full name was Mabel Dana Lyon but she dropped her first name professionally, sort of like James Paul McCartney). It’s really much more of a Gothic melodrama than a film noir, and it got quite good reviews when it was released (New York Times reviewer wrote that it was “an effective tale of evil intent that adds up to good entertainment”) but doesn’t hold up that well today. It begins with a brief bit of narration by the central character, Polish internee Victoria Kowalska (Italian actress Valentina Cortese, playing a Pole on Hollywood’s usual assumption that one foreign accent was as good as another), showing off two houses. One is the titular house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, which has a “For Sale” sign in front while Victoria explains it’s the house she thought would be a refuge for her. The other is her own house in Warsaw, which was bombed by Nazi German forces at the start of World War II, where her husband and her entire family were killed. Then we catch up to Victoria in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony, Germany, where she befriends a fellow prisoner named Karin Demakova (Natasha Lytess, best known as Marilyn Monroe’s early dramatic coach and, it’s rumored, her Lesbian lover). Karin tells Victoria that she has an aunt who lives in San Francisco who’s raising her son Chris (Gordon Gebert), and is hoping to rejoin her after the Allies finally liberate the camp and let everyone go. Unfortunately, Karin dies just a few days before the Allies liberate Belsen and Victoria steals her ID papers and decides to pass herself off as Karin, get sent to San Francisco, and escape the round-robin of refugee camps through which most concentration-camp survivors went. Along the way she’s interviewed by two Allied officers, one of whom addresses her in German while the other, Major Marc Bennett (William Lundigan), speaks to her in English after she reveals she learned it in school.

Alas, when she gets to New York she receives a cable dated May 31, 1945 that says her (or Karin’s) Aunt Sophia is dead. In New York she meets Alan Spender (Richard Basehart), a distant relative of Sophia’s, and arranges with him to get the documents making her an heir to Aunt Sophia’s estate and the legal guardian of 11-year-old Chris. While she’s in New York Alan starts dating her and, at least partially because it will be easier for her to stay in the U.S. if she marries an American citizen, they get hitched and move to San Francisco to the big house on Telegraph Hill. Once she settles into the house she meets Margaret (Fay Baker), Chris’s governess, who takes an instant Mrs. Danvers-esque dislike to her. She manages to break the ice with Chris by offering him ice cream and cake just before he goes to bed – though Margaret says that’s against house rules and pressures Chris to decline the snack – and playing catch with him on the grounds of the estate. Only one afternoon she misses the ball and discovers an old playhouse where Chris used to play until a fire severely damaged it. Chris tells Victoria that the playhouse caught fire after he inadvertently caused an explosion with a chemistry set. Both Chris and Margaret tell Victoria not to tell Alan about the fire, but Alan already knows about it. Later Victoria goes back to the ruined playhouse to explore it (and Charles laughed out loud that she did this while wearing high heels), only she loses her footing and is about to plunge through the burned-out floor when Alan rescues her in time. At one point Alan offers to take her to dinner and a movie, and I joked that the movie was going to be a double bill of Rebecca and Gaslight, two earlier (and much better!) movies of which this one was reminding me. Then Victoria is scheduled to take Chris to an afternoon baseball game, only at the last minute she bails out on the mission and Margaret takes him instead. Victoria goes off in the family car to do some grocery shopping, only in the middle of her drive the brakes to her car suddenly stop working – an especially dangerous situation in a notoriously hilly city like San Francisco – and though she’s relatively unharmed, the car crashes onto a dirt embankment made by a construction crew. The mechanic who fixes the car suspects that the brake fluid line was cut deliberately.

Meanwhile, Marc Bennett has moved to San Francisco and set up a law practice in the city. He makes no secret of his attraction to Victoria, though they don’t act on it (this being a Production Code-era movie), and she confesses to him that she’s not really Karin Dernakova even though she’s living in Karin’s identity. Gradually Victoria becomes convinced that Alan is deliberately trying to kill her; she attempts to reach out to Marc for advice, but Alan continually shows up and/or answers his attempts to return her panicked phone calls. Victoria breaks the lock on an elaborate scrapbook that contains a newspaper clipping which establishes the date of Sophia’s death as June 3, 1945 – three days after Alan sent the cable announcing that she was dead already. From this Victoria deduces that Alan murdered Sophia to grab her fortune, only his plan was complicated by her sudden appearance as “Karin.” Ultimately Alan, who’s after Sophia’s fortune (he’s bitter at having literally been the black sheep of the family, the one who had no money) and is determined to kill everyone in between him and inheriting it, attempts to kill Victoria by feeding her a glass of poisoned orange juice, but Victoria tricks him into drinking the poisoned glass himself. Margaret is arrested by police for not having helped save Alan, and at the end Victoria hooks up with Marc and the two of them, along with Chris, leave San Francisco to start a new life as a family. The House on Telegraph Hill is one of those movies that seems to have been assembled, Frankenstein’s monster-style, from bits and pieces of older and considerably better films. Early on Charles joked that it looked like The Old Dark House, and while it has little in common with James Whale’s 1932 horror-comedy masterpiece there are plenty of films it does evoke, notably the aforementioned Rebecca and Gaslight. Even the business with the heroine tricking the villain into drinking the poison intended for her was done 19 years earlier and considerably better by director Clarence Brown, writers Marie Belloc Lowndes, John Meehan, and Wanda Tuchock, and star Joan Crawford in the recently rediscovered film Letty Lynton.

Oddly, the first half of The House on Telegraph Hill is considerably better than the second; the opening looks like an Italian neo-realist film and the Rebecca-ish intrigues in the early scenes in San Francisco, especially between Valentina Cortese and Fay Baker, are considerably more interesting than the rest. Once the writers start dropping hints that Alan Spender is not the solicitous husband he seemed but a cold-hearted killer, the films turns a lot flatter and more ordinary and dreary. It also doesn’t help that Richard Basehart and William Lundigan look so much alike; through much of the movie it’s unclear which of the two men in Victoria’s life is solicitous and wants to help her, and which wants to kill her. It’s also amazing that Robert Wise made this incredibly lame movie in the same year, and for the same studio (20th Century-Fox), as his quiet, understated science-fiction masterpiece The Day the Earth Stood Still. Early on in the scenes in the concentration camp I joked to Charles, “This film started at 11, and it’s already up to 20 by now.” The House on Telegraph Hill isn’t thematically a film noir – at least once we know which ones are which, the good guys are 100 percent good, the bad guys are 100 percent bad, and Margaret is the only truly conflicted character (not that Fay Baker has much of a chance to show that!). Despite beautiful Gothic cinematography by Lucien Ballard, it’s not that much of a film noir visually either; the atmosphere is too much Gothic horror and too little noir. Like Wise’s later The Haunting, The House on Telegraph Hill has a stiffness in its approach that takes away from the thrills. Incidentally, and ironically given that they were making a film in which he tries to kill her, Richard Basehart and Valentina Cortese fell in love with each other, started dating, and married as soon as the film wrapped. At her insistence the couple moved to Italy, where they lived the next eight years. By relocating to his wife’s home country Basehart pretty much killed his career in American films, but he got the role of his lifetime as the second (and less sympathetic) male lead in Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954), probably his best-known credit. Basehart ultimately returned to the U.S. and did his best to re-establish his American “rep” after he and Cortese broke up in 1960.