Conspiracy thrillers have been a popular subgenre in movies ever since the silent era with such memorable entries as The Ace of Hearts (1921) in which Lon Chaney stars as a member of a secret society that gets rid of people deemed unfit to live among them. Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) is an equally menacing early talkie classic and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), about a brainwashed ex-military hero being controlled by political subversives, is probably the best-known representative of all. However, it wasn’t until the 1970s that conspiracy thrillers reached an all-time high in popularity as witnessed by such iconic Hollywood releases as The Parallax View (1974), The Conversation (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Capricorn One (1977) and The Boys from Brazil (1978). Other countries contributed their own variations on the genre like Spain, which released La Casa sin Fronteras (English title: The House Without Frontiers), a deeply unsettling effort from director Pedro Olea, which was made while General Franco was still in power and which prefigures the paranoid scenarios made popular by The Parallax View and others.
Olea, who, as a Spanish citizen, witnessed the atrocities and political persecutions of the General Franco regime, co-wrote a screenplay with Jose Agustin and Juan Antonio Porto that addressed the fear and oppression experienced by people living under a fascist government but placed it in a modern context. The macabre opening prologue to the film sets the appropriately sinister tone as a small tribunal of men pass sentence on a naked man imprisoned in the chair before them. The victim is condemned for betraying the high purposes of their secret organization and is then subjected to an agonizing slow death as his entire body is pierced with small stilettos.
The main storyline of The House Without Frontiers begins as Daniel (Tony Isbert), a young man from the country, arrives by train in the city of Bilbao. He rents a room in a seedy boarding house and quickly finds part-time work distributing pamphlets on the street but that all changes after he meets a mysterious elderly man (Jose Orjas) who claims to have influential connections. He sends Daniel to a job interview in a sprawling mansion where he meets Senorita Elvira (Viveca Lindfors), who accepts him as a new employee of the “House without Frontiers” and gives him an assignment.
At a nearby bar, Daniel reads over his instructions which require him to locate Anabel Campos (Geraldine Chaplin), a former florist assistant who has gone missing. It turns out that Anabel, like Daniel, had accepted a job with the “House without Frontiers” but fled the organization after a senior member of the tribunal was found murdered. Was she guilty? Is she in hiding or has she vanished without a trace?
As Daniel’s search for Anabel becomes more pressing, he begins to notice strange occurrences in his world, which only increase his suspicions about his new employer. For instance, why has he been assigned the pseudonym of Raimondo Barclay instead of his own name? When he tries to question his employers about the assignment, he is repeatedly thwarted in his attempts, culminating in an incident where he finds the main headquarters deserted and two construction workers walling up a doorway in the mansion. WTF?
Other weird events include Daniel interrupting a séance being conducted in his boarding house where the medium is trying to contact her dead son, a previous tenant who had killed himself in Daniel’s room (This aspect of the film also prefigures the plot of Roman Polanski’s The Tenant from 1976). He also learns that Anabel was given the new identity of Lucia Alfaro and mysteriously vanished after working as a cemetery caretaker for a wealthy family. Daniel eventually tracks Anabel down in a remote seaside village where she has been living incognito and she reveals to him the horrible truth about the “House without Frontiers.”
While the first half of The House Without Frontiers unfolds like a mystery thriller, the second half transitions into a creepy allegory about the crimes inflicted on Spanish citizens by the Franco regime. It was well known that there were several right-wing extremist organizations under Franco such as the Politico-Social Brigade (secret police) and the Terror Blanco (White Terror), who were kidnapping, torturing and murdering citizens who were considered enemies of the state.
The tribunal of the “House without Frontiers” is clearly a metaphor for Franco’s secret police but their objectives and targets remain ambiguous at best which only increases the paranoia and sense of doom. The organization appears to be run by mostly elderly ex-military personnel but their reason for existing has a Kafka-like absurdity; they attract and then destroy new members, who represent the younger generation and are like lambs to the slaughter.
The doom-laden atmosphere of the film is enhanced by Olea’s decision to shoot the movie in his hometown of Bilbao, which, at the time, was an economically depressed port town that had once been the center of a major ironworks and ship building industry. Today, Bilbao is a hipster tourist mecca thanks to a revitalization movement in the 1990s that begin with the launch of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry. But in 1972 when Olea shot The House Without Frontiers, the waterfront was an eyesore, the skies were overcast from factory pollution and the city’s once fine parks, landmarks and historic avenues were in need of repair. In other words, an ideal setting for such a pessimistic and dark tale about a murderous fascist society.
The House Without Frontiers was made and released during Franco’s reign (he died in November 1975) and it is surprising that the film was not withdrawn or banned by government censors. True, the film industry in Spain was showing signs that close monitoring and censorship by government officials was becoming less restrictive as made evident by the 1972 releases of such subversive horror thrillers as Vicente Aranda’s The Blood Spattered Bride, Elroy de la Iglesia’s Cannibal Man and Jorge Grau’s The Legend of Blood Castle, all featuring nudity, sex and violence. Nevertheless, The House Without Frontiers was a box office failure and vanished from movie screens quickly.
It is interesting to note that Olea filmed the scenes set in the secret organization’s headquarters in Ibaigane Palace, a former military station where Olea had actually served during his mandatory time in the army (the location is now an athletic club).
Olea would go on to make several other offbeat movies such as No es Bueno que el Hombre este solo (English title, It’s Not Good for a Man to Be Lonely, 1973) with Jose Luis Lopez Vasquez as a lonely man obsessed with his mannequin companion. Later triumphs include the period adventure fantasy The Fencing Master (1992) and the fatalistic romance, Tiempo de Tormenta (2003) but his main claim to fame is still his second directorial effort, The Ancines Woods (1970), a chilling folk horror tale in which a serial killer is suspected of being a werewolf.
For The House Without Frontiers, Tony Isbert is cast in the pivotal role of Daniel, a handsome but overtly cerebral protagonist whose lowkey inquisitive nature eventually gives way to full-blown panic before the finale. Isbert appeared in several other horror offerings during this phase of his career such as Riccardo Freda’s Tragic Ceremony (1972), Leon Klimovsky’s The Dracula Saga (1973) and Eloy de la Iglesia’s No One Heard the Scream (1973), in which he is most convincing as the untrustworthy gigolo/lover of an older woman (Carmen Sevilla) who harbors a deadly secret.
The other notable co-stars of The House Without Frontiers include Geraldine Chaplin, who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through the movie, and Viveca Lindfors, who turns out to be the one of the most cold-blooded torturers in the secret club. Chaplin had already been making movies in Spain since 1969 when she starred in the psychological thriller Peppermint Frappe (1967), the first of many films with her companion at the time, director Carlos Saura.
American actress Patty Shepard also turns up in a brief cameo appearance as a one-night stand/bar pickup for Daniel. Shepard forged out a career for herself in Spanish horror and exploitation films of the 70s with such highlights as Glass Ceiling (1971), The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman (1971), The Killer is One of 13 (1973) and The Witches Mountain (1973), a bizarre, dreamlike folklore fantasy filmed on location in the Pyrenees.
The House Without Frontiers remains an unjustly neglected conspiracy thriller plus it contains several film and literary homages, whether intentional or not, to other touchstone works like 1944’s Laura (Daniel’s growing attraction to Anabel is based solely on her photograph and accounts of her life before her disappearance), Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Suicide Club (1878) and the works of Franz Kafka. At one point, there is even a scene on a train where a blind passenger is reading aloud a passage in Braille from Kafka’s final novel, The Castle.
The House Without Frontiers is not currently available on any format in the U.S. but this seems like an ideal pickup title for Mondo Macabro, which was released numerous Spanish cult films in recent years such as The Blood Splattered Bride (1972), The Witches Mountain (1973), Paul Naschy’s Inquisition (1977), and Jorge Grau’s Hunting Ground aka Code of Hunting (1983). Let’s hope they add this to their list of acquisitions.
Other links of interest:
https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2013/01/17/inenglish/1358450538_975819.html
https://mascontext.com/issues/bilbao/a-city-in-film
http://legacy.aintitcool.com/node/77016
Cinema Sojourns 