The House on Carroll Street is a movie that knows what it is like to be a movie from thirty years before it.
It is a delicious throwback to the days of Alfred Hitchcock. In fact, there are only two items in the House on Carroll Sreet to suggest that this movie is NOT a product of that decade. A) the cast of this movie were just being born when Hitchcock was in his prime. and b) there is a bit of frontal nudity. Needless to say, you would never see that in Hitchcock's days (in fact before he made Psycho it was considered indecent to show qa toilet being finished on screen, or so I heard)
The makers of The House on Carroll Street have a great eye for detail, and they recapture the period beautifully. Everything has been carefully assembled, down to the last fat stripped tie. If the House on Carroll Street was released thirty years earlier, it may have been a classic, but by the 1980's the Hitchcock/film-noir formula had become somewhat generic. There are still great movies like Chinatown, but there are a lot of critically bashed items as well such as Brian de Palma's work. The look of this movie took me back, but not the storyline. It feels shallow, derivative and also rushed, so it's not as great a movie as it could've been. It's just a good movie.
Leading the cast is Kelly McGillis. Her performance is not that great, but her screen presence is interesting. She plays the role with a sort of Grace Kelly mindset, and she knows how to act with her face (although the makeup job deserves a bit of credit there too). In terms of character, she doesn't have a whole lot to work with, in fact most of the characters in the film are genre stereotypes. On screen, this film is full of life, but on the pages it could use a bit more strength. The House on Carroll Street is not great, but it's enjoyable.
