The New Pictures: House of Numbers

House of Numbers (MGM) offers to whom it may concern what is probably the most ingenious improvement in the fine art of can-opening since the cake with the file inside. Like most great inventions, this one is based upon a simple idea: Since prisons are designed to prevent exit, might it not be much simpler to effect entry? In short: the easiest way to break out is to break in.

The idea occurs to a lifer named Arnie (Jack Palance), whose brother (also portrayed by Actor Palance) happens to be his dead-ringer. To his brother and his ever-loving wife (Barbara Lang), Arnie communicates his plan: let his brother jump the wall of the prison’s industrial area, which is lightly guarded during the night, and hide in a stack of crates. Next night Arnie will hide in the crates while his brother sleeps in the cell; during the night Arnie will dig a man-sized hole in the ground near the prison wall, cover it with boards and cover the boards with sod.

Next night the brother will escape, and the night after that. Arnie will hide in the hole he has dug. A short time after the nightly cell count has revealed the prisoner’s absence, brother Palance will kidnap, at the point of a wooden pistol, a motorist on a highway near the prison, and later ditch the car in a residential district, where Arnie’s wife will pick him up. As soon as the news of the kidnaping reaches the police, they will assume that the prisoner has escaped, and relax precautions. Whereupon Prisoner Palance will pop out of his hole and over the wall to freedom.

Neat. But in the end. of course, something goes wrong, and Arnie is paid the wages of sin. More precisely, something goes wrong from the beginning, and it is Actor Palance. This performer has made his reputation by the portrayal of violent emotion, and this state of spirit he portrays most vividly. Indeed, he seems unable to portray anything else. Does he eat a sandwich? No, he tears it to pieces like a starved piranha. As Palance plays his parts, it becomes increasingly difficult to decide which is the sane brother and which the crazy one. In any case, if there is anything more depressing than Actor Palance, it’s two of him.