The House on 92nd Street (Fox Film Noir)
by Henry Hathaway
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Gene Lockhart, Leo G. Carroll, Lloyd Nolan, Signe Hasso, William EytheDirector: Henry Hathaway
Cinematographer: Norbert Brodine
Editor: Harmon Jones
Producer: Louis De Rochemont
Writer: Barr? Lyndon
Writer: Charles G. Booth
Writer: John Monks Jr.
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; German (Original Language); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 1.0; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 88 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-09-06
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Movie Reviews of The House on 92nd Street (Fox Film Noir)
Movie Review: Psuedo-noir still fascinates
Summary: 3 Stars
It's a good idea to buy the DVD of this movie and listen to the commentary by Film Noir expert Eddie Muller. You'll find out that yes, 'The House on 92nd Street' is based on two actual cases in the FBI's file concerning German spies during World War II. However you'll also discover that the story is very loosely based on those cases. So loosely that no German agent even came close to stealing the film's MacGuffin ("Process 97"), the 'formula' for creating the atomic bomb.
One of the best things about this picture is the on location photography. According to the DVD commentary, filming on location was difficult in those days, particularly due to the bulky sound equipment they had to carry around. This was the first time that the sound equipment was carried around in smaller suitcases and it made it much easier for the technical crew to shoot the movie.
If you live in New York City as I do, you'll get a kick out of seeing how some of the neighborhoods looked back in 1945. My favorite scene is right before we enter the beauty shop--there's a shot looking uptown on Broadway and you can see the elevated #1 train at the 125th Street stop. I can tell you that the train stop hasn't changed much at all (you probably can guess that I live right nearby). Although it appears that Tieman Place, which is one street south of 125th Street, appears to extend to the east. Today, the street goes as far as Broadway, since the Grant Housing Projects are now in the way.
Eddie Muller argues that 'The House on 92nd Street' is really not a film noir and I agree with him. You can thank the producer, Louis De Rochement. He was responsible for all those March of Time documentaries in the 30s and made the first widely-seen anti-Nazi documentary, "Inside Nazi Germany" in 1938. De Rochement teamed up with J. Edgar Hoover and half of 'The House on 92nd Street' is narrated in the style of those old newsreels. This tends to take away from the film noir feel and makes the film seem more like a propaganda exercise for Hoover and the FBI, then a drama with an uninterrupted arc.
That's not to say that some of the 'newsreel' scenes aren't interesting. They use the actual footage filmed by the FBI across the street from the German Embassy and you can see all these Nazis coming and going with their Seig Heil salutes! Equally impressive is the massive fingerprint file room at the FBI. Hoover bragged that the FBI had over 1,000,000 fingerprints on file during the War. Muller argues that this was an exaggeration. Nonetheless, when you see inside FBI headquarters, you will be impressed.
'The House on 92nd Street' is the story of a young American born college student of German ancestry, Bill Dietrich, who's recruited by the FBI to infiltrate a German spy ring (principally in New York City before and during World War II), which is on the verge of stealing the aforementioned 'Process 97'. He's played by Tyrone Power look-a-like, William Eythe, who tragically died at the young age of 38.
The 'inciting incident' occurs when a German operative is hit by a car and killed near Bowling Green in NYC. He blurts out a clue--the name of a shadowy and elusive figure by the name of 'Mr. Christopher'. Throughout the film, the FBI director Briggs (played by the ubiquitous and dependable Lloyd Nolan) is seeking to find out who this Mr. Christopher is.
Dietrich ends up infiltrating the Nazi spy ring. The sinister characters that make up the spy ring keep the story fairly absorbing. Focus on Signe Hasso as Elsa Gebhartdt, Lydia St. Clair as Johanna Schmidt and Gene Lockhart as the man with the amazing memory, Charles Roper. In addition to Lloyd Nolan, you'll probably recognize Leo G. Carroll, famous for the Topper TV series in the 50s and The Man from Uncle in the 60s (not to mention all the Hitchcock films he was in!).
There are a few nifty noorish scenes that crop up in '92nd Street'. One particularly memorable one is when the Nazi spies bump off one of their own informants who can't hold his liquor. They dump him down at the train tracks where presumably a train will soon run over his body.
'92nd Street' loses its verisimilitude during the film's climax. Dietrich is found by the gang and taken to the house on 92nd Street where they give him 'truth serum' and hope to make him talk. He seems immune to the powerful drug so Gebhardt is about to shoot him with a silencer when the FBI bursts in and shoots her and captures the rest of the ring. Of course it never happened that way (the real spies were discreetly rounded up without any fanfare).
'92nd Street' also focuses quite a bit on the technology of the time. Audiences back then must have been thrilled to see the remarkably new 'see through mirrors' and special chemicals that reveal watermarks on ordinary letters.
Unfortunately, all the documentary realism and propaganda undercuts the main drama. Most noirs focus on the main character all the time but here, Dietrich, sometimes disappears for long stretches of the narrative (here, the main character shares equal billing with a bigger star: The FBI!).
'The House on 92nd Street' is quite an interesting docudrama--more instructive as a document of its times than as successful drama. Watch it once and then again with the DVD commentary. After that, put it on the shelf!
Summary of The House on 92nd Street (Fox Film Noir)
A stentorian narrator tells us that the USA was flooded with Nazi spies in 1939-41. One such tries to recruit college grad Bill Dietrich, who becomes a double agent for the FBI. While Bill trains in Hamburg, a street-accident victim proves to have been spying on atom-bomb secrets; conveniently, Dietrich is assigned to the New York spy ring stealing these secrets. Can he track down the mysterious "Christopher" before his ruthless associates unmask and kill him?The House on 92nd Street has solid claims to a place in film history, and not just as an engrossing true-life counter-espionage movie. Its working title was "Now It Can Be Told," and its story--about the F.B.I. smashing a Nazi spy ring in New York--involved the stealing of atomic secrets. That surely upped the topical ante for 1945 audiences (who, we may assume, had a lot less ambivalent feelings about the F.B.I. than latterday viewers).
Of more lasting significance, the movie pioneered a salutary postwar trend in American filmmaking: forsaking the Hollywood soundstages and back lot to tap the freshness and palpable authenticity of real-world locations. Shot mostly in New York City, House was a collaboration between 20th Century-Fox and Louis de Rochement, the documentary producer renowned for his "March of Time" newsreels. The working formula of House and its successors was to fully incorporate documentary techniques into the storytelling, and to "film where it actually happened." That included using some nonprofessional performers, sometimes people who had been involved in the case. Fox went on to embrace this aesthetic in not only the de Rochement-produced 13 Rue Madeleine and Boomerang! but also the gangster movie Kiss of Death, the journalistic detective story Call Northside 777, and another F.B.I. case history, Street With No Name. Even the storybook fantasy of the studio's 1947 Miracle on 34th Street was charmingly validated by setting Kris Kringle down amid real New Yorkers and real Gotham grittiness.
Noiristes should stand advised that House on 92nd Street, a key influence on film noir, is not quite a true noir itself (whereas Anthony Mann's T-Men is noir to the max). Even as a German-American double agent, hero William Eythe is unburdened by neurosis or doubt, and the stylistic keynote is documentary gray, not black--though a murder in a railroad yard and the final showdown are memorably stark and dark. --Richard T. Jameson
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