The House on Carroll Street

This is a wonderfully Hitchcockian, quite realistic, but also nostalgic return to the time when some people were looking for Communists under every bed, as well as in Hollywood and =Life= magazine. Kelly McGillis is terrific as the idealistic civil liberties type who discovers Nazis in the garden and her own personal SS man in a Senator's office. Mandy Patinkin is really convincing as the Senate staffer who hounds McGillis from her job. He even looks a little like a famous politician with the initials RMN. For a bang-up thriller without any shooting, car chases or explosions, this is one of the best videos around.

This movie had its moments, but i actually enjoyed it. Hitchcock style film with an interesting plot. If you like hitchcock, you will like this. The cast is good with Kelly McGillis and Jeff Daniels very well casted and Mandy Patinkin is excellent in a rare role.

Like Guilty By Suspicion this film follows the tale of what it was like to be on the wrong side of a McCarthy style witch hunt looking for reds under the bed. Not having lived through it however I can not judge how accurate this account is. Certainly old film footage of a man with a gavel shouting down anybody who he believes is obstructing justice looks intimidating. This story follows idealist Life magazine picture editor Emily (McGillis) who falls foul of an ambitious politician (Potentkin)who himself as a few skeletons in his own closet. It's about being on the right side. You can bring ex-Nazis into America as long as you have no conscience and are quiet happy to win the space race with information they have given you, the problem is you just don't get caught. With the help of her FBI watcher, Cochran (Daniels) they begin to unwind this crooked scam, unfortunatly it's hard to except that they find every clue and the man who is her tormentor in chief just happens to be involved as well. The story just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. On the plus side the look and feel of the film are great and if prepared to overlook the outrageous and some what slow plot it's watchable.

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.

Although the film's story-line is fiction, the facts of this low-key thriller are based on truth and provide a 'what if' scenario that keeps the viewer engaged. The director, Peter Yates, captured a style of filming and cinematography that makes it feel almost like an undiscovered Hitchcock film. Kelly McGillis is believable, although perhaps not quite the typical Hitchcock blonde, and Jeff Daniels may sound a bit too modern in some of his speech inflections, but Everything else about this film reeked of authenticity, from the genuine feel of the sets and authentic but real clothing, to the dialogue. I don't know why this film rated only a middlin score with viewers - perhaps they were expecting more of an action thriller,rather than the political intrigue style of thriller that it is.