Valentina Cortese has an interesting face rather than a conventionally beautiful one. Startling eyes -- the right eye looks straight ahead while the left is canted somewhat outward, lending her every expression a kind of fey quality. From most angles her big features are full of bone structure, dominated by an aquiline nose, compellingly ordinary. She has the overall appearance of a northern Italian paisana from the Po Valley. She could be stomping on bitter rice next to Sylvana Mangano.
In this film, Cortese is an inmate at Bergen-Belsen and adopts the identity of a friend who dies. Not that this makes any difference in the rest of the story. She might as well be who she claims to be.
Anyway, with her new identity, she returns to a Gothic house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco that she has inherited from a deceased aunt. Her young son -- or rather the son of her dead friend -- lives there with his guardian (Richard Basehart) and a strangely distant maid servant (Fay Baker). She and Basehart, after a too-quick romance, have been married, but the moment they move into this cockeyed American Gothic house things seem askew.
Basehart has the difficult job of projecting politeness and caring towards his wife without even the underlying hint of warmth. And Margaret, the icy maid, seems to have wandered in from "Rebecca." The only person Cortese can depend on for honesty and confidence is William Lundigan, in the Kent Smith role.
In fact, everybody and everything seems to have wandered into this rather unfocused romantic drama from someplace else. The young kid has a playhouse in the back yard, bigger than the domicile I now occupy. It has a hole in the floor and wall and there is a scene in which Cortese, snooping around as usual, almost falls through to the street half a mile below when she is surprised by the ominous Basehart. I thought surely the climactic scene will involve that dangerous hole, but no. It's never seen again, thrown in willy nilly like so many other adventitious elements. The whole production is a patch work of vague threats, all seen from the point of view of the uncertain and perhaps imbalanced Valentina Cortese.
I didn't much care for it. Not so much because it's a mixture of romance, mystery, and drama in which everyone seems to be scuttling around behind everyone else's back, but because little of it seems to hang together. Pretty thoughtless.
Others might enjoy it more than I did.
In this film, Cortese is an inmate at Bergen-Belsen and adopts the identity of a friend who dies. Not that this makes any difference in the rest of the story. She might as well be who she claims to be.
Anyway, with her new identity, she returns to a Gothic house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco that she has inherited from a deceased aunt. Her young son -- or rather the son of her dead friend -- lives there with his guardian (Richard Basehart) and a strangely distant maid servant (Fay Baker). She and Basehart, after a too-quick romance, have been married, but the moment they move into this cockeyed American Gothic house things seem askew.
Basehart has the difficult job of projecting politeness and caring towards his wife without even the underlying hint of warmth. And Margaret, the icy maid, seems to have wandered in from "Rebecca." The only person Cortese can depend on for honesty and confidence is William Lundigan, in the Kent Smith role.
In fact, everybody and everything seems to have wandered into this rather unfocused romantic drama from someplace else. The young kid has a playhouse in the back yard, bigger than the domicile I now occupy. It has a hole in the floor and wall and there is a scene in which Cortese, snooping around as usual, almost falls through to the street half a mile below when she is surprised by the ominous Basehart. I thought surely the climactic scene will involve that dangerous hole, but no. It's never seen again, thrown in willy nilly like so many other adventitious elements. The whole production is a patch work of vague threats, all seen from the point of view of the uncertain and perhaps imbalanced Valentina Cortese.
I didn't much care for it. Not so much because it's a mixture of romance, mystery, and drama in which everyone seems to be scuttling around behind everyone else's back, but because little of it seems to hang together. Pretty thoughtless.
Others might enjoy it more than I did.