The Woman in the Window

The catastrophe just around the corner is the premise for Fritz Lang's first unabashed film noir. Settling stuffily into middle age, Edward G. Robinson lectures on criminal psychology at Gotham University (est. 1828). One morning he packs his wife and kids onto the train for a summer in Maine, then repairs to his club for dinner, a brandy or two, and a comfortable snooze in a wing-chair.

A portrait in a gallery next door had caught his attention, however, so before heading home he gives it a second glance. Suddenly its beautiful subject (Joan Bennett) looms up behind him, reflected in the glass. They flirt rather formally, stop for a drink, then head back to her apartment under the pretext of viewing more of the artist's work she'd posed for. Suddenly a man Bennett has seeing on the sly with barges in and, enraged, tries to throttle Robinson, who stabs him with scissors. And suddenly Robinson's complacent life lies in shards.

He decides, for the sake of his and Bennett's reputations, to dump the body along a stretch of rural road upstate, then part ways forever with this woman from the window. But, far from a nobody, the murdered man turns out to be a wealthy developer, whose death claims headlines. And his bodyguard (Dan Duryea) pays a visit to Bennett, to blackmail her.

A shrewd and cultivated man caught in the vise of circumstance, Robinson proves his own worst enemy. When fellow club member Raymond Massey, a police inspector, chats casually about the crime, Robinson blurts out details that only the killer could have known. And as the jaws of the vise squeeze ever more tightly, Robinson devises ever more desperate stratagems to hide his guilt and protect Bennett...

While Robinson proves reliably expert, Bennett invests her part with a reserved, almost remote, air that lends to the uncertainty. Her cool contralto beckons, but she plays hard to get. Her arrangements with her dead paramour suggest something sordid but she's not quite the tramp she would be the following year in Scarlet Street (again opposite Robinson and under Lang).

The sure-footed Lang simply uses a public clock down the street from Bennett's brownstone to log in a precise chronology of the fateful night. That befits a plot which leans toward the clockwork, but plausibly so. Or rather, does until just its last few minutes. For all intents and purposes, the movie ends, convincingly and satisfyingly, with Robinson slumped in a chair, clutching a drained glass. But MGM wasn't yet ready for the uncompromising vision of the emergent noir cycle, and must have recoiled in horror. So a whimsical wrap-up was hastily grafted on. Some would argue that, in consequence, the movie falls into the valid subcategory of `oneiric' noir. Others would argue that it's just a craven cop-out, at cross purposes with all that's gone before. Luckily, The Woman in the Window displays enough artistry and integrity that it really doesn't matter all that much either way.

For a man who is a psychology professor and knows the tricks of the human mind, it's interesting how Edward G. Robinson keeps trying to incriminate himself in the murder of financier Arthur Loft. It all starts with that painting that Robinson saw in a pawn shop, The Woman In The Window.

After seeing off wife Dorothy Peterson and children Bobby Blake and Carol Cameron and after having drinks at his university club with friends Raymond Massey and Edmond Breon, Robinson pauses to stare at the haunting picture and lo and behold the model for that picture appears, Joan Bennett maybe even more beautiful in person. Maybe someone of stronger character might have resisted, but I'm hear to tell you who haven't seen The Woman In The Window that Joan Bennett would have taken a lot of resisting.

Once up in her place and still while things were quite innocent the guy who's been keeping her Arthur Loft shows up in no mood for explanations. He starts beating up on Robinson and choking him when Bennett hands him a pair of scissors with which he stabs him to death.

The thing to have done right then and there is call the police. My guess is that Robinson might not have even been given an indictment by the Grand Jury once the story was told. But both Bennett and Robinson are worried about scandal, him of course with his professor status on the line. They decide to move the body and dump it in the woods.

After that Robinson through his friend Massey gets a lesson in forensics that would be great material for an NCIS investigation. He also picks up a blackmailer in the person of Dan Duryea. It all comes together in a very surprise ending.

Fritz Lang directed The Woman In The Window and so successfully that Robinson, Bennett, and Duryea came back to do Scarlett Street for him the following year. Robinson gives one of his best performances as a mild mannered man in a situation that is Kafkaesque, but of his own making. Joan Bennett was never sexier on the screen.

I suppose Lang might have put this in for some comic relief, but I got a real kick out of a more grownup Spanky McFarland as the Boy Scout who finds Loft's body. This is one mercenary Scout who has definite plans for the reward Loft's firm has put up to find their missing CEO.

The Woman In The Window is a fine noir thriller in which the only criticism was that the ending might be a little too neat, you'll see what I mean when you view the film. Otherwise with the suspenseful mood and the acting by the cast, you can't ask much more of a noir thriller.

The Woman in the Window is directed by Fritz Lang and adapted by Nunnally Johnson from the novel "Once off Guard" written by J.H. Wallis. It stars Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey & Dan Duryea. Music is by Arthur Lange and Milton R. Krasner is the cinematographer.

After admiring a portrait of Alice Reed (Bennett) in the storefront window of the shop next to his Gentleman's Club, Professor Richard Wanley (Robinson) is shocked to actually meet her in person on the street. It's a meeting that leads to a killing, recrimination and blackmail.

Time has shown The Woman in the Window to be one of the most significant movies in the film noir cycle. It was part of the original group identified by Cahiers du Cinéma that formed the cornerstone of film noir (the others were The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura and Murder My Sweet). Its reputation set in stone, it's a film that boasts many of the key noir ingredients: man meets woman and finds his life flipped upside down, shifty characters, a killing, shadows and low lights, and of course an atmosphere thick with suspense. Yet the ending to this day is divisive and, depending what side of the camp you side with, it makes the film either a high rank classic noir or a nearly high rank classic noir. Personally it bothers me does the finale, it comes off as something that Rod Serling could have used on The Twilight Zone but decided to discard. No doubt to my mind that had Lang put in the ending from the source, this would be a 10/10 movie, for everything else in it is top draw stuff.

At its core the film is about the dangers of stepping out of the normal, a peril of wish fulfilment in middle age, with Lang gleefully smothering the themes with the onset of a devilish fate and the stark warning that being caught just "once off guard" can doom you to the unthinkable. There's even the odd Freudian interpretation to sample. All of which is aided by the excellent work of Krasner, who along with his director paints a shadowy world consisting of mirrors, clocks and Venetian blinds. The cast are very strong, strong enough in fact for Robinson, Bennett and Duryea to re-team with Lang the following year for the similar, but better, Scarlet Street, while Lang's direction doesn't miss a beat.

A great film regardless of the Production Code appeasing ending, with its importance in the pantheon of film noir well deserved. But you sense that watching it as a companion piece to Scarlet Street, that Lang finally made the film that this sort of story deserved. The Woman in the Window: essential but not essentially the best of its type. 8/10

Edward G. and Joan Bennett star in a noirish crime drama that feels almost surreal (with god reason, as the ending makes plain). Robinson is a staid professor whose family is off on a weekend jaunt. He meets an alluring woman who invites him to he apartment for "drinks and." When her psycho boyfriend unexpectedly shows up, the prof ends up killing him during a scuffle. To protect himself and the gal, he gets rid of the body. Then the fun really starts. Edward G. is at the top of his form here, and Bennett is sexy and ever so slightly tawdry, even fully clothed. The ending, which has been used or misused in many movies before and since, here works beautifully. I am surprised I had never seen this particular melodrama until now. I am no spring chicken, and used to be a film critic, to boot.

This wonderfully entertaining "film noir" by master director Fritz Lang is a curiosity, defying all of our expectations as a viewer and basically subverting the "noir" genre barely before it had gotten started. The dark shadows, the femme fatale, the harboiled detectives, the murder... all the elements are in place for a typical outing, but when all is said and done, look back at the motivations, the events, even the "femme", and what we have is not a world of evil (the typical "noir" stance) but a world of innocence darkened by a few petty thugs. Like the more obviously subversive (and equally wonderful) "Kiss Me Deadly" fifteen years later, "The Woman in the Window" seems to say that evil only lives when people look hard enough for it - practically a "film noir" rebuttal. As in "M" and "Fury," Lang (a refugee from the Nazi regime) once again examines issues of social evil in ways more complex than any of his contemporaries. Enjoy "The Woman in the Window." The cast is impeccable, the writing a delight, the direction peerless, the music score years ahead of its time. A small feast.