Some months ago, TCM ran The Red House, and since it had an interesting synopsis and cast, I decided to record it. Unfortunately, it aired on a day when the DirecTV box guide screwed up the schedule, so I recorded the wrong thing. And then I noticed that I have a copy of it on one of my Mill Creek box sets -- the movie having been produced by United Artists, it presumably wound up in the public domain after 28 years. So I put that DVD in and watched the movie.
The movie is set in one of those rural areas where there's a small town, and a lot of farm types on the outskirts of town that send their kids to the school in town, only the movie is current enough that everybody goes to school by bus. One of those farm families is the Morgans, who have a farm far enough out that not a lot of people come to visit, as well as a fair amount of forest that Dad wants to keep everyboy off of. That may be a bit odd, but there's more to the oddness about them than that. Father figure Pete (Edward G. Robinson) and mother figure Ellen (Judith Anderson) adopted Meg (Allene Roberts) when she was just an infant and her parents suddenly picked up and left to go work on farms in the south during the Depression, leaving the kid behind. The parents died not long after, so Pete and Ellen eventually adopted little Meg.
As you can probably guess, there's more going on than meets the eye. And about to come into the family and find that out is Nath Storm (Lon McCallister). He meets Meg on the school bus one day, and takes a liking to her, although he's already techincally got a girlfriend in Tibby (Julie London). But Nath winds up working for the Morgans, and seeing Meg more often, he finds their relationship deepening.
I mentioned that forest earlier. Pete has hired another young man, Teller (Rory Calhoun), to watch for trespassers and keep them off, with a shotgun if necessary. And Pete pretty much means everyone, including Meg. Meg has heard rumors of a red house somewhere deep in the woods, and wants to know if there really is one. Not only that, but she wants to know why her adoptive father wants to keep everybody away from that red house. Nath is willing to help her, or at least help get her out of jams, but doing so is going to put him in danger too. But you know everybody is going to wind up at the red house for the movie's climax, where the plot will finally be resolved.
The Red House is an interesting movie in some ways, in that it combines gothic drama with a bit of a thriller. Considering Edward G. Robinson being in the lead, it's unsurprising that he gives another competent performance. But as I was watching it, I couldn't help but feel as though there was a lot less going on than meets the eye. I think it's the sort of movie that had it been made back in the 1930s, it probably would have been made strictly as a B movie. But with more independent producers and a star of Robinson's caliber, they obviously wanted to make something more serious, extending the movie to about 100 minutes, which makes it a bit too slow.
Still, The Red House is definitely worth a watch, especially if you can find a better print than on the Mill Creek DVD.
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