THE HOUSE ON CARROLL STREET

This 1988 period thriller was a box-office bomb, but so what?  It stars Jeff Daniels and Kelly McGillis, and is directed by Peter Yates, all capable of good work.  Plus there's Mandy Patinkin and Jessica Tandy, and an intriguing story about smuggling Nazi scientists into the US.  And some critics, such as Roger Ebert, did like it.

But oh boy, what a disappointment this farrago is.

In the first scene, Emily Crane (McGillis) is before a Senate committee, being interrogated by prosecutor Ray Salwen (Patinkin).  Because she refuses to cooperate, the FBI, in the form of Joe Cochran (Daniels) and his partner, are told to carry out surveillance on her.  She also loses her job so instead she gets one reading for an old lady (Tandy).

And then, would you believe it, whilst in the old lady's garden, she conveniently overhears a sinister conversation in the next house, involving none other than Salwen!

It's an absurd coincidence, which is the first sign that this story is going to have problems, and sure enough there are instances such as Emily conveniently eavesdropping something significant at just the right moment, or important information being written on the dust jacket of a book for no good reason other than for her to pick it up.

Naturally Joe gets involved in helping Emily investigate what's going on, and in saving her life on several occasions, and in sleeping with her when she's in a state of shock after her apartment is bombed.

Anyhow it turns out that Salwen is helping Nazi scientists into the country in order to help the US fight the Cold War.  Whether to use people who may be war criminals to fight the evil of Communism is an interesting moral issue which this film is does not pursue for one moment.  .

It's typical of the film's slack writing that it's never clear what Emily and Joe hope to achieve, given that he's taken off the case and that other government agents are actively helping Salwen.  

So when Joe eventually arrests some Nazi scientists is it a problem for them?  Given that Joe's 'reward' is to be reassigned to Montana it seems doubtful but we're never told.  In the final scene it doesn't seem that either Emily or Joe much care what the Nazis' fate is and frankly by this stage neither did I.

There's a lot of action-cum-suspense scenes clunkily staged and scored which show that Yates is no Hitchcock or de Palma.

Jessica Tandy is totally wasted playing an irrelevant character.

Mandy Patinkin does his best with some mediocre dialogue but his death at the end from a fall from the roof of Grand Central Station is horribly contrived.

Daniels and McGillis also do their best but have zero chemistry.  She says that they are like oil and water, because he works for the government and she doesn't.  Like a lot of the film this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. 

And 'the house on Carroll Street' itself is not interesting or especially important.

So for once the cinema-going public was right and Mr Ebert was wrong.

RATING: xx Arrested Development