HOUSE OF SECRETS (1956)

Larry Ellis is a handsome, affable young sailor in Marseilles for a 24 hour furlough. While sitting at a sidewalk cafe, a man approaches him, mistaking him for someone named Steve, gives him a shoebox and runs off. When Larry opens the box, hundreds of pound notes go flying in the air. (The first totally unrealistic thing that happens here is that his fellow diners collect the money and give it back to him.) When Larry takes the money to the police, Col. Burleigh of an international police agency realizes that Larry is an exact double of Steve, a smuggler who was recently killed in a car crash, and he asks Larry to work for them, impersonating Steve and infiltrating the counterfeiting gang that Steve worked for. Larry goes through voice and mannerism training and gets to know Steve's girlfriend Judy who already works for the cops. The two most visible members of the gang are Lauderbach and Pindar, but they want Larry to uncover the unknown head of the group. They suspect the group is readying a shipment of paper from overseas with which to print a scad of forged money that is difficult to identify as such. And, because the money in the shoebox was real, Burleigh thinks that Steve may have been involved in a double-cross operation. Larry/Steve pulls off his impersonation and meets the rich and eccentric Madame Ballu, who gives the gang orders but may not actually be the person at the top, and her showgirl niece Diane. From here on out, the movie becomes a series of nicely done scenes of violent fisticuffs resulting in an occasional death, but the connective material concerning who is doing what to whom is not so clear. Suffice to say that in the end, our hero and the bad guys wind up in a Hitchcockian scene in an airplane in which, though none of the passengers know it, a bomb is set to go off very soon.

Some critics see this as a forerunner of the secret agent movies of the 1960s, though I found it more like a subset of that genre, in which an average Joe gets drawn more or less against his will into becoming a spy. Much of this has a fairly light tone, though it never comes off as a spoof or satire like many of those later movies do, and the stakes are indeed deadly for many of the characters. I never really bought Larry's quick and efficient transformation into a steely infiltrator, and the later plot machinations got confusing. But I very much enjoyed Michael Craig as Larry (called Steve for most of the movie); he's attractive and has a rough charm that feels appropriate to his character. He’s generally cool and calm, though his occasional moments of expressing a kind of "what the hell's happening now?" feeling ring true. Barbara Bates (Phoebe in All About Eve) is quite good as the girlfriend, as are Geoffrey Keen as the main cop, Anton Differing as one of the chief villains, and Brenda de Banzie as Madame Ballu. The revelation of the identity of the big boss is disappointing, but the plane climax is great, and the last scene in the film is carried off in an unusual way, ending just moments before the baddie gets his comeuppance. Some viewers of this film think that Craig would have made a good James Bond and I agree. I sure do love me some Michael Craig movies. Thanks, YouTube algorithm. The title is meaningless; the American title, Triple Deception, is more accurate. At top right, Craig; at left, Craig and Bates. [YouTube]