The House of the Seven Hawks

After an extraordinary 25 years under contract with MGM, Robert Taylor’s final fare for the studio is Richard Thorpe’s The House of the Seven Hawks, a nautical noir in which a lonely charter boat captain, after his latest client drops dead on board, falls into a maze of criminal intrigue where absolutely nobody can be trusted. When Captain John Nordley (Taylor) docks in Holland with a man’s fresh corpse (Gerard Heinz), Inspector Van Der Stoor (Donald Wolfit) rejects his claim that the man had a heart attack so jails Nordley in the Hague on suspicion of murder. A mysterious benefactor, who pays his bail and sets him up at a fancy hotel, is revealed to be a wealthy ship captain named Rohner (Eric Pohlmann) who, it turns out, was in cahoots with Nordley’s late passenger, the two having been collaborating to decipher a map that leads to a sunken Nazi ship with a strongbox of salvageable jewels. From there the plot twists and turns around murders and attempted murders until the key players converge on a farm on a remote island, the elderly farmers’ silent existence soon punctured by police chases and gunfights. As for Nordley, he’s tugged between the affections of two female connections: his dead passenger’s beautiful daughter Elsa (Linda Christian) and a woman (a wonderfully manipulative Nicole Maurey) who pretends to be his dead passenger’s beautiful daughter. Philo Hauser plays the good-natured but duplicitous Charlie Ponz, who (inexplicably) becomes Nordley’s trusted helper but whose devotion will remain up in the air throughout. Relatively unknown and ripe for rediscovery, the film is thoroughly entertaining from start to finish, Taylor’s wrong-man-in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time journey a brilliant manifestation of noir alienation.