Review of House by the River

This little known Fritz Lang film from the early 50s features stark and morbid set pieces that you won't soon forget, such as a dead cow and later a dead woman in a sack floating endlessly with the tides of the river. The gossipy neighbor woman (Ann Shoemaker) provides some dark humor by constantly needling our "hero" (the weaselly Louis Hayward) about calling the cops to clean up the mess in the river. The upstanding characters in the movie are Stephen's (Hayward) wife Marjorie (Jane Wyatt) and his accountant brother John (Lee Bowman). John has a limp which makes him something of a social outcast, but even the friends that he has start to abandon him when he's heavily suspected of murdering Stephen's servant girl Emily (Dorothy Patrick). He seems to be willing to sacrifice his own place in the community even though his brother lied to him about having a pregnant wife to motivate him to help in the cover-up. The most obvious reason turns out to be true -- he's not committed to saving his brother but rather to an unspoken love for Marjorie, which Stephen crassly exploits.

As you can tell, the story is a bit contrived and mainly of interest in the ways it makes Stephen's character so utterly despicable even though he's the central focus of the movie. Lang himself brings some great style to the film through neat photographic effects. It isn't one of his greater films, but it also doesn't quite deserve the neglect it's suffered over the years even from his fans. It is a nasty but gorgeous little exercise in atmosphere and characterization that all Frtiz Lang fans should seek out.