I have seen a lot of vintage film noir. A lot of it concerns the red scare at the time. Y’know, the McCarthy hearings and all that. That material hilariously locks those films so firmly in their time that they might as well be insects preserved in amber.
1988 neo-noir The House on Carroll Street surprised me by opening with a scene set in that era and in one of those trials. I find it interesting how smug and superior films of the 1950’s portrayed those hunting the alleged Communists, while films decades later set in that same era take the exact opposite approach, putting the accused on a pedestal and painting the accusers as monsters.
The opening has Kelly McGillis on the stand and refusing to give names to a commission led by Mandy Patinkin, who is the villain. As often happened in the real trials, she is cited for contempt of Congress. I think that’s an interesting charge, as I can’t imagine anybody of any political stripe who doesn’t have contempt for Congress.
Having been fired from her job at Life magazine, McGillis takes a job reading aloud to Jessica Tandy in the house of the latter. She will just happen to hear an argument at the house next door between a young German she ran into on the street earlier (Christopher Buchholz) and an older man she doesn’t recognize (but who is speaking in German). Curiously, Patinkin is also there.
No surprise the older German man is a Nazi war criminal, but the mystery is why Patinkin is involved in a conspiracy to smuggle such people into the US. There is some talk about these former Nazis having engaged in such experiments as seeing how long a person could be submerged in ice water before dying. Maybe US officials were worried these war criminals would fall into the hands of the Soviets, much like how the sides competed for Nazi rocket scientists. Perhaps, similar to the “missile gap”, the countries had a perceived “freezing inmates to death” gap.
Jeff Daniels and Kenneth Walsh are FBI agents assigned to tail McGillis. It is no surprise Daniels finds himself falling for her. The one wild card is whether Walsh is as by-the-book as he appears, and whether he will assist or impede Daniels, should his partner feel compelled to assist McGillis, in defiance of the law and the direct orders given them.
Patinkin is quite good as the rather banal, slightly grinning face of evil. That his character is in such control of himself at all times makes him all the more creepy. What is odd is I was never sure what motivates his character to do the things he does. He doesn’t appear to be power-mad, nor do I believe he is sincere is his quest to rid the country of communists.
Jessica Tandy’s character has an interesting moment where she suggests to McGillis that a rock through the window of the house next door would be a good way to determine whether or not it is abandoned. I laughed when we see Tandy watching through binoculars as McGillis does exactly that. I wish there had been more of Tandy’s character in this, but I’m not sure how she could have been integrated into the plot further.
The movie could use some more levity, as it is a rather dry affair. The only other moment I can think of that amused me was when Daniels is trying to defuse a bomb in McGillis’s apartment and not showing much confidence in his efforts: “I was never very good at bomb disposal. I nearly flunked the course.”
The House on Carroll Street is a so-so movie, a neo-noir that casts the red scare era in a completely different light than the pictures made in the time in which it is set. Perhaps the most interest aspect of it is behind-the-scenes. Walter Bernstein, the screenwriter, was actually a blacklisted writer in the McCarthy era, and so had first-hand experience with what he wrote.
Dir: Peter Yates
Starring Kelly McGillis, Jeff Daniels, Mandy Patinkin
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray