House By The River

Virtually unseeable for half a century, House by the River, the rarest of Fritz Lang's American films, proves to be an atmospheric serving of Southern Gothic with style and perversity to burn. This is a happy surprise, given that the film was made at a low point in Lang's career, at a Poverty Row studio, with a low-wattage cast. Louis Hayward--whose dark, spoiled good looks and insinuating smile suggest Orson Welles' tawdry evil twin--plays an effete author in a small 19th-century town. One hot, lazy afternoon he's tempted (in a brilliantly directed scene) by thoughts of the comely maid soaking in his upstairs bathroom. There follows an awkward pass, a hand over her mouth, and suddenly he finds himself an accidental murderer. With a dead body to get rid of, living by a river comes in handy. But on this river, secrets have a way of returning with the tide.
The script by Mel Dinelli (who had just written the trim 1949 thriller The Window) ably milks the suspense, and there's a creepy moonlit search by rowboat for the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't corpse. The failed novelist, beginning to relish his guilt, acquires fresh inspiration as a writer and also becomes a cagy manipulator of other people, notably the wife (Jane Wyatt) who doesn't know what he's done, and the crippled brother (Lee Bowman) who does. Making a virtue of production resources only slightly upscale of Edgar G. Ulmer, Lang turns the titular domicile into an Expressionist hothouse where lace curtains yield a web of shadows, potted plants throw jagged black spears across high-key faces, and the breeze from the river is anything but fresh.