House of Strangers is riven with violent tensions. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, fresh from completing the masterpiece A Letter to Three Wives, rewrote Philip Yordan’s screenplay from scratch after it had been rejected by Zanuck. The Guild however would not allow his name to appear in the credits as sole author; Mankiewicz therefore withdrew his name altogether, and Yordan alone received screen credit. Once the film was released, some Italian-American families threatened to sue 20th Century Fox, seeing themselves reflected in the story of a patriarch arriving penniless from Palermo and, within a generation, building a powerful bank through usury. Worse still, inside Fox, its president Spyros Skouras began to harbour the suspicion that de te fabula narratur. A sombre family drama – father against sons, brother against brother – that the Hollywood Code pulls back from tragedy at the very last moment, House of Strangers casts a gaze of rare brutality upon ethnicity as destiny. Everything is claustrophobic, baleful, repellent: huge plates of spaghetti nobody wants to eat, Il barbiere di Siviglia resounding with grim buffoonery, a Mussolini stylised bust, while mispronounced Italian keeps erupting uncontrollably – the revenge around which everything revolves can’t just be vengeance, only vendetta retains its full weight and terror. The narrative joints creak at times, as the love story between Richard Conte – the most presentable and educated of the brothers – and the radiant, ironic Susan Hayward struggles to fuse with the endogenous drama of the Monetti clan. Edward G. Robinson exposes a domineering yet vulnerable body to the knot of filial love and hatred, while Mankiewicz’s exquisite sense of space contrasts the long dark pan, climbing the staircase of the old house and the wounds of memory, with the sinuous exploration of Hayward’s apartment, where Conte enters after seven years. She is absent, yet the atmosphere is thick with her – aching, pre-sexual – the cloud of face powder, the soft gown on the bed, a Guerlain flacon aux abeilles on the bedside table: the perfume of a true American woman, which had haunted him from their very first encounter like the sudden glimpse of another life. Five years later, Philip Yordan would win the Oscar for the screenplay of the western remake Broken Lance.

Paola Cristalli