1950's HOUSE BY THE RIVER is another combination of noir and horror from Lang, a master of both. The film stars Louis Hayward as an unsuccessful (but well to-do) novelist who accidentally murders his maid (Dorothy Patrick) after she resists his advances. Hayward talks his brother (Lee Bowman) into helping him cover up the crime before his wife (Jane Wyatt) gets home.
The duo sinks the body in the nearby river, but it isn't long before the body surfaces and things start to go wrong. The disappearance of the maid becomes a media circus and the brothers react quite differently, with Hayward relishing in the attention and taking advantage of it to rekindle his career and fuel his next book and Bowman becoming more and more withdrawn with guilt.
Like Lang's earlier work, HOUSE BY THE RIVER is a master class in cinematography. Here Lang teams with Edward J. Cronjager to turn Hayward's house into a dimly lit cavern.
The best part of the movie is Hayward's performance as the truly creepy main character. This guy is totally unsympathetic, becoming more and more depraved and evil the longer the movie runs. Instead of learning his lesson, he courts more and more potential disaster, seemingly willing to do anything to cover up his crime. Hayward is great at being fake-nice one minute and then transparently manipulative the next.
Bowman is also good as the brother, basically the exact opposite of Hayward, a super-sympathetic character who is lonely and reserved and usually wants to do the right thing. This contrast serves to make Hayward seem even more evil by comparison. It could have been a bland role, but Bowman makes his character real enough that he doesn't come off like a saint or anything phony like that. Just a regular guy.
So ends Horrorfest 2013 – 31 horror movies in 31 days, in honor of Halloween. I'll list my 5 favorites below, and just for fun, the one I liked the least, as well.
Top 5 (in no order):
Targets
Mad Love
Scream of Fear
Island of Lost Souls
House by the River
The worst:
The Conjuring
And some quick stats:
Of the films watched this month, 13 were black and white, 18 were color and 2 were silent. 14 of them were from the U.S. with 4 each coming from the UK and Spain, 2 each from Czechoslovakia and Japan, and 1 each from Korea, Russia, Denmark, Poland and Sweden. 7 were from the 60s, 5 from the 80s, 4 each from the 40s and 2010s, 2 each from the 20s, 30s and 2000s, 3 from the 90s and 1 each from the 50s and the 70s.
In the interest of full disclosure I should note that I also watched DRACULA, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON this month, all on the big screen – but of course they don't count because I'd already seen them. And tonight, FRANKENSTEIN is on the menu.
Happy Halloween!
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