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After a short course in a Nazi spy academy, Dietrich was sent back to the U.S. He soon found himself knee-deep in sleazy, shifty-eyed characters who were nibbling away at what this film calls the Government's Process 97 (construction of the atomic bomb).
How J. Edgar Hoover's G-men saved the day is the tense story of The House on 92nd Street. The desperate goings-on centering around an inconspicuous Manhattan brownstone building (run by talented Swedish Actress Signe Hasso) escape the routine of cloak-&-dagger melodrama by their realism.
When Producer Louis de Rochemont, a veteran of 22 years of newsreel and documentary photography (THE MARCH OF TIME), set out late last year to make a movie about his favorite subject, the FBI —which he fondly regards with all the hero worship of a small boy—he plunked his idea right on Director Hoover's desk. For their story, De Rochemont and Writer John Monks Jr. pored over scores of FBI case histories and pieced together a selection of the Bureau's better experiences.
Actors, technicians and equipment were toted hither & yon to get such actual backgrounds as the California Institute of Technology and the radio shack used by the Bureau to relay bogus information abroad. By shooting only 35 feet of film (less than half a minute) in the studio, able Director Henry Hathaway set some sort of record.
The De Rochemont-Hathaway-Monks approach to a purely fictional drama somehow suggests that the people on the screen are real and just happen to have been caught by a fortuitous camera. Actually, some of the film's G-men are the real McCoy. The picture serves up, as an added fillip, real FBI shots of pre-Pearl Harbor traffic in & out of the German Embassy.
For those who believe that naive Americans are no match for wily Europeans in the spy trade, and for those who just like their movies to move, The House is recommended entertainment.