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By
NICK ZEGARAC
At the time of its release
The House on 92nd Street (1945) was mounted as a
personal project of Darryl F. Zanuck's --
something of a prestige film for the studio.
Fusing stock footage shot in and around Washington
D.C. with traditional sets constructed back in
L.A., the tale is that of Bill Dietrich (William
Eythe), an all-American college athlete of German
extraction who is approached by Nazi sympathizers
with a plot to overthrow western government. Being
a good little American, Bill reports the ring of
spies to the state department, headed by George A.
Briggs (Lloyd Nolan). Shortly thereafter, Dietrich
becomes a double agent, seemingly in cahoots with
the Nazis, all the while feeding the U.S. state
department news of their activities. However, on a
routine trip to Hamburg, Dietrich begins to
suspect that his Nazi cohorts are beginning to
figure out that he is not all that he seems to be.
The plot thereafter escalates into a dangerous
game of cat and mouse, whereby Dietrich is racing
against time to learn the whereabouts of a high
ranking Nazi official before his loyalties to the
state department are found out.
What might have been a palpable plot line for
director Henry Hathaway is irreversibly
degenerated into episodic circumstance by the
interjection of a persistent and thoroughly
annoying narration. Clearly, Hathaway and Zanuck
were interested in making this film as close to a
document or testament of espionage circa 1939-40
as possible. The narration is therefore designed
to instill a sense of documentary film making into
the fictional proceedings. But instead of
augmenting the narrative it interrupts and even
stalls the story, offering obvious bits of
information such as "Bill turned over his findings
to the state department" even as we are observing
Bill doing just that on the screen. Honestly, is
there any reason why an audience couldn't figure
at least two thirds of the storyline out without
the play-by-play commentary?
Fox's DVD transfer is just above average. The
grayscale has been sufficiently rendered but there
is an excessive amount of grain in the location
shots that doesn't bode well with the more
pristine elements photographed inside studio sets.
A slight bit of shimmering is also present.
Age-related artifacts abound, but are more obvious
in the stock footage. Whites are rarely clean.
Black levels are not particularly deep. Fine
details are rarely realized. The audio is
represented at a fairly audible level. Echo
effects seem a tad overly pronounced. There's also
a slight hiss during quiescent scenes. The only
extra of merit is an audio commentary and press
book that is informative. |
