"There are certain things in it I liked," Fritz Lang recalls, "trick photography--and I remember something with a corpse floating in the water...."* Louis Hayward, in the clutch with his wife's maid, accidentally murders the woman; all attempts to cover up the crime ricochet, naturally. This tale of guilt, murder and retribution is virtually an unknown film; William K. Everson writes, "With the exception of...Moonfleet, House by the River is about the last stand of the old Lang: stark, nightmarish, abrasively anti-social in its parade of bickering, petty small-town types, and like most of his films, existing in its own little totally studio-created world, without any hint of fresh air or real exteriors. It must represent an extreme in the physically black entries in the film noir genre." *Peter Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang in America