The House on Telegraph Hill

In Robert Wise’s The House on Telegraph Hill, Valentina Cortese plays a Polish widow detained in a Nazi concentration camp who steals the identity of her deceased friend Karin Dernakova to start a new life in San Francisco after the camp is liberated (“I had become one of the thousands of miserable strays”). Reunited with the original Karin’s young son, who was sent as a baby to live with his wealthy American aunt, also recently deceased, the “new” Karin accepts him as her own and ultimately marries the boy’s guardian, Alan Spender, played by the fantastic Richard Basehart. As Karin discovers the family’s secret histories and parries with the cold, suspicious housekeeper Margaret (Fay Baker), she finds her life in danger. With so many narrative parallels to Mitchell Leisen’s No Man of Her Own (1950) the year earlier, Cortese can’t compete with the performance of the earlier film’s Barbara Stanwyck. Still, the extremely dramatic Italian-style mansion sets are fantastic, Karin’s nighttime strolls through the mansion are stunningly lit, and a scene in which her car races through the San Francisco hills uncontrollably (her brakes had been cut) is perfectly thrilling.