THE HOUSE OF FEAR
(Universal) Don’t be misled by the title, for Director Joe May is no Mary Shelley. The house of fear is a theatre, its Frankenstein well hidden; so well that you will be more concerned with the mystery than with the horror, which fails to horrify. There are two corpses, but the studio has played the unsporting trick of keeping all the clues miles away from the crime, so that the film relies for its interest neither on the queer nor the queasy, neither on mystery nor on horror, but on incidents built up around suggestions of both. Once reduced to this class, "The House of Fear" can be said to come reasonably well up to expectations, for the incidents are handled in a sufficiently workmanlike way. The leading man in a play collapses on the first night. "His body disappears. In the guise of a "prodoocer" a detective revives the play a year later. Ghosts appear, lives are threatened, and the new leading man also takes a premature curtain. Nobody minds about him; but the heroine (Irene Harvey) and her beloved are on the spot, and William Gargan, as the detective, has to do something about it. He does. This is an average good picture.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 12, 15 September 1939, Page 34
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209THE HOUSE OF FEAR New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 12, 15 September 1939, Page 34
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