The Red House (1947): watch the full film free, legally

A farm bordered by forbidden woods

Delmer Daves’s 1947 American psychological horror film centres on the isolated farm of Pete Morgan, a handicapped farmer, and his sister Ellen. They live with Meg, their adopted teenage child, and their seclusion has made them figures of mystery in the nearby town. Edward G. Robinson plays Pete, with Judith Anderson as Ellen, Allene Roberts as Meg, Lon McCallister as Nath Storm, Rory Calhoun as Teller, and Julie London as Tibby.

Meg persuades Pete to hire Nath, a 12th-grade classmate, to help with the farm chores. On Nath’s first evening, he proposes taking a shortcut home through the old woods, part of Pete’s sprawling property. Pete reacts with alarm. He insists that the woods are dangerous, warns Nath of a haunted house painted red, and orders him to stay away.

Nath nevertheless crosses the woods after dark and returns shaken by unexplained moans and yells. Embarrassed by his fear, he later goes back and is struck from behind, ending up in a stream. He suspects Pete, although Meg and Ellen maintain that Pete never left the room. Nath and Meg become absorbed by the search for the red house, setting aside Sundays, Nath’s only day off, to explore the woods without finding it.

Meg, Nath and the red house

The search changes the relationship between Meg and Nath. Meg begins to fall in love with him, while Tibby, Nath’s jealous and manipulative girlfriend, seeks to keep him for herself. Pete has also made a private arrangement with Teller, a local handyman and petty thug: Teller may hunt on the property if he keeps trespassers away.

When Nath cannot escape a date with Tibby, Meg searches alone. She discovers the red house in a rocky ravine several miles from the farm, reached by an old cow path. Teller fires rifle shots to frighten her from returning. Meg falls down a slope and breaks her leg. Nath enters the woods to find her when she fails to come home, then carries her back to the farm.

Pete is enraged by their defiance of his command. After learning that Nath has climbed a tree to visit Meg at her bedroom window, Pete dismisses him from the farm and forbids him to see her. Nath returns to work at his mother’s general store and later takes summer work at Tibby’s family farm. As Meg recovers, Pete grows increasingly controlling and begins calling her Jeannie. The name points toward an earlier connection between Pete, Ellen and the red house, and toward a secret that Ellen has helped him keep.

From Chamberlain’s novel to California locations

The screenplay was adapted by Daves and Albert Maltz, who was uncredited, from George Agnew Chamberlain’s 1945 novel of the same name. The novel had been popularly serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. Principal photography began in April 1946 and finished on June 28. The production filmed in the Sierra Nevada in and around Sonora, California, including the Kenny Dairy near Murphys, the Bowlsby apple ranch in Tuolumne City, and areas near abandoned gold mines in Columbia.

Roberts was 17 when she was cast. Producer Sol Lesser obtained London on loan from her Universal Pictures contract and Calhoun from his Selznick Pictures contract. The film marked a career breakthrough for London, who had been known primarily as a singer. An early screening took place at the Plaza Theatre in Palm Springs on December 30, 1946, before the United States release on February 7, 1947.

Miklós Rózsa composed the score and continued his use of mysterious theremin cues, played by Samuel Hoffman. The music has stylistic similarities to Rózsa’s scores for Spellbound and The Lost Weekend, both released in 1945. A. H. Weiler of The New York Times praised the cast, Robinson’s performance, Daves’s direction and Rózsa’s “appropriately macabre musical assist.” In 2019, Paste magazine named The Red House the best horror film released in 1947.

Film details from the Wikipedia article “The Red House (film)”. Text adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0.