The House on Carroll Street **** (1987, Kelly McGillis, Jeff Daniels, Mandy Patinkin) – Classic Movie Review 8227

Director Peter Yates’s impeccable 1987 thriller The House on Carroll Street stars Kelly McGillis in her prime, at the peak of her popularity and on fine form as Emily Crane, a Fifties witchhunt blacklist victim, fired from her job, who takes work as companion to an old woman and stumbles across a German plot to ship ex-Nazi scientists into America.

Jeff Daniels is the perfect foil for McGillis as officer Cochran, the FBI agent investigator who helps her survive several life-or-death scrapes.

Director Yates builds the suspense nicely to a brilliant climax in New York’s Grand Central Station. With its first-class screenplay, careful filming, handsome production, effective control of pacing and tension, good period detail, excellent score and cinematography, and attractive playing, this is an excellent thriller in the vintage Hitchcock style. It manages that relatively rare trick of being a Hollywood mainstream movie that is entertainment and food for thought at the same time.

Also in the cast are Mandy Patinkin, Christopher Rhode, Jessica Tandy, Jonathan Hogan, Trey Wilson, Remak Ramsay, Kenneth Welsh, Christopher Buchholz [aka Christopher Rhode], Brian Davies, Paul Sparer, Bill Moor, Michael Flanagan, Robert Stanton and Cliff Cudney.

The House on Carroll Street is directed by Peter Yates, runs 100 minutes, is made and released by Orion Pictures, is written by Walter Bernstein, is shot in colour by Michael Ballhaus, is produced by Robert Benton, Peter Yates and Robert F Colesberry, is scored by Georges Delerue and is designed by Stuart Wurtzel.

Blacklisted writer in the Fifties and victim of the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), Walter Bernstein still continued to write under pseudonyms. He wrote pseudonym-themed witchhunt movie The Front (1976). He was born on 20 August 1919.

The title recalls director Henry Hathaway’s 1945 black and white fact-based film noir spy thriller The House on 92nd Street.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8227

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