capsule reviews

House on Telegraph Hill, This is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch

Richard Basehart and Valentina Cortese in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)

House on Telegraph Hill (Robert Wise, 1951)

Here’s a noir that does two interesting things. First, it opens by invoking real-world horrors in the form of the Holocaust. I feel like this is a very unusual move, though I could be wrong, and it raises the bar for anything bad that can happen to our heroine—she has, after all, recently emerged from an actual concentration camp.¹

Second, the woman at its center is a con artist, who steals her dead friend’s identity so she can escape post-war Poland and get to America (and, once there, take advantage of her friend’s wealthy American family). It is in fact quite easy to imagine the version of this movie in which she’s a tragic villain. But here, she is a hero who might have assumed a false identity but willingly accepts the obligations that c…