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The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)
Rate:
5
Viewed:
11/15
11/15:
The House on Telegraph Hill is too inflexible for an enjoyable murder mystery flick.
In many ways, it's a rip-off of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca and
Suspicion and Orson Welles' over-the-top
The Stranger, which were produced in 1940, 1941, and 1946, respectively. Hence, I'm seeing nothing new here.
Meanwhile, it's hard for me to root for the female protagonist because she's a fraud, having no legal claim to the
inheritance. I was actually with Alan Spender (Richard Basehart) to expose her identity and be together with the
governess.
I know I'm being manipulated when the director wants to force me to follow a path, making me think a
certain person might be the murderer. Yet in The House on Telegraph Hill, it was actually him the whole time.
After the cat has been let out of the bag, the momentum dies afterwards.
Anyway, an interesting trivia is that after Richard Basehart's wife died of brain tumor, he met Valentina Cortese on
the set for the first time and married her not long afterwards, but they divorced nine years later.
All in all, The House on Telegraph Hill is a predictable rip-off of several well-known films.