“Father, you read the new banking act?” “I ain’t even read the old one, why?”
A family drama, a bit noir, certainly shadowy, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s House of Strangers (1949) tells a story about a Sicilian-American banker’s four sons and the way they relate to their father. By the time the film begins, we’ll learn, the banker has died. One son returns to the bank to meet his brothers. It’s been seven years. What brought them all to this uneasy point? The one son has been in prison, and of course, he has his motives. It’s a movie about debts, trying to forget debts or collect on them, and about the moral problems of investing or losing one’s life. It’s also about ethnic visibility. We open on busy city streets.
The camera eventually pulls a man out of a crowd. A man who, later in the film, will exclaim that he’s “come back to life.” In stone, there, Monetti Trust & Loan; there, the name of the father, the name of the family. MONETTI shows up on doors and walls, stitched on the back of a robe, all over, throughout the film. Gino Monetti (Edward G. Robinson) is the patriarch. He’s absent at the film’s beginning, but present as living man and present as ghost through the film’s “then” and “now” storylines. He’s funny, cantankerous, scrappy, old-fashioned, Old World. (Charitably: his business methods are loose because their scale was meant to be human and informal.) We’ll find out more about him as the film goes on.
The son, forbidden—but at first only a hint, an echo, of prohibition. The camera placed within the bank shows him walking up to the doors, and into the building, in the next shot. Richard Conte is Max Monetti. He plays a phantom-prodigal role.
This is a sly use of offscreen foreground space, the one guard going up, as if he’s just an extra exiting to the left of the screen, but he returns back into the screen a moment later to notify another guard.
I retroject into Max’s return a prefiguration of Christopher Walken’s reunion with Lawrence Fishburne and the guys in King of New York. Conte’s Max is a different sort of avenging angel. The return scenes resemble each other only in a minor way. In the Ferrara film, the moment’s fake tension is broken with real camaraderie. In this film, the moment’s real tension is broken with fake camaraderie.
Despite any niceties, it is, in fact, a family and a house of strangers. Gino practices tough love for his sons, and he’s stubborn and unrelenting. His brand of fatherly authority only “takes” on his son Max, who remains loyal to him.
Flashbacks provide most of the story. We watch Gino Monetti stifle the ambitions and embarrass the sensibilities of his striving sons—three of them, anyway. The spaghetti dinners he insists upon are a bore. Tensions between immigrant and WASP modes marble a lot of the interactions these characters have with the figures of the world they want to occupy. Eventually, through legal maneuvering and laundering, the three sons engineer a humiliating betrayal of their father. The bank becomes more respectable, less tied to the sullied, old-fashioned family name. Max, too, is betrayed.
This is all a sketch, on my part—loose impressions. I don’t need to describe any more of the plot. The overall picture is interesting enough …
Lovely and unassuming street scenes dot House of Strangers, capturing a particular kind of sleepiness to the sidewalks. (Some of this is actual location shooting in New York, I understand; some is good work on a soundstage.) Crowd scenes punctuate these, where market shoppers and bank customers provide a bit of life. Though some scenes feel almost elemental and pared down, as if for a minimal stage performance, the hints of documentary reportage fullness anchor the movie in time and space and history.
Mankiewicz’s film “feels” like a respectable Hollywood literary property adaptation (this is one of three adaptations of the source novel); but it’s also adroit with style, never slathered on too thick, mind you, but instead an overtone. There are traces of a realist aesthetic, with its location photography and earthier bits of dialogue and conflict. And the an almost mythic subtext: we’re following spirits unmoored from Little Italy, unmoored even from their bodies.
“Some day they even find ways for HUSBANDS to have babies!” (Gino Monetti looking ahead to the ways of American progress. Richard Conte’s Max looks game for it!)
In the United States, the highest grossing film of 1949 was, according to Variety, Jolson Sings Again. Anyone seen it?