House by the River

Inexplicably considered one of director Fritz Lang’s lesser noirs, House by the River is a ravishing, perverse, and contemporary film that depicts the wages of sin in a Victorian culture of suppression. Louis Hayward stars as Stephen Byrne, a self-centered novelist who lives in the titular house with his wife Marjorie (Jane Wyatt) and maid Emily (Dorothy Patrick), whom he murders “by accident” while attempting to rape her and then dumps her body in the river. The human body is the central theme, whether instinctively desirable like Emily’s or unnaturally deformed like his brother John’s (Lee Bowman) to whom Marjorie has maintained a distant attraction. Stephen’s obsession is dark and sadistic, from fetishizing Emily’s shower drainage to instinctively murdering women while they’re in a fellatio stance, but it’s also guilt-ridden: Emily’s dead body, like an animal carcass, taunts Stephen by floating downriver in front of the house, appearing ghost-like at the top of the stairs, etc. It can’t be over-stated how visually scrumptious this film is: art director Boris Leven and cinematographer Edward J. Cronjager create interiors of rococo walls (wallpaper like a Matisse painting) and deep expressionism (daylight is snuffed out by thick velvet curtains) and exteriors of stunning riverside compositions and ominous vistas on the water, especially at night.