The Biblical tale of Jacob and his sons, Joseph and his jealous brothers, is transcribed into a powerful and pessimistic vision of Italian-American family life in House of Strangers. Gino Monetti (Edward G. Robinson) is an Old World patriarch whose monomaniacal style inspires hatred in his American sons. Only Max (Richard Conte), whose personal memoir this is, remains paradoxically the most independent and the most loyal, and with the inexorability of a classic noir, he is the inheritor of his father's guilt. Robinson won an award for best actor at the Cannes festival for his performance, and the film confirmed Mankiewicz in the eyes of a young Jean-Luc Godard as "one of the most brilliant of American directors." Godard cites the sequence which initiates Max's memoir as "one of the finest flashbacks in the history of cinema, the whole length of a staircase, accompanied by a theme from Rossini...." He adds, "Mankiewicz's characters are ambitious people who, through deception, end up by succeeding, and lovers who through divorce end up marrying.... After several variations on the theme of violence, Richard Conte climbs splendidly into Susan Hayward's car. So House of Strangers ends. News comes that Joseph is now telling us all about Eve." (1950-52, in Godard on Godard, Tom Milne, ed.)