The Woman in the Window

Woman in the Window (1944)

A methodical movie about a methodical cover-up. Edgar G. Robinson is the perfect actor for a steady, rational man having to face the crisis of a murder, and Fritz Lang, who has directed murderousness before, knows also about darkness and fear. There are no flaws in the reasoning, and if there is a flaw to the movie, it is it's very methodical perfection. Even the flaws are perfect, the mistakes made and how they are shown.

We all at one time or another get away with something, large or small. And this law-abiding man finds himself trapped. He has to succeed, and you think he might. Part of me kept saying, I wouldn't do that, or don't be a fool. But part of me said, it's inevitable, he'll fail, we all would fail. So the movie moves with a steady thoughtful pace. It talks a lot for an American crime film, but it also has the best of night scenes--rainy streets with gleaming dark streets, hallways with glass windows and harsh light, and dark woods (for the body, of course). But there are dull moments, some odd qualities like streets with no parked cars at all, and a leading woman who is a restrained femme fatale, which isn't the best. And then there are twists and suspicions, dodges and subterfuges. And of course Dan Duryea, who makes a great small-time chiseler.

This one was a true nail biter. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. Mr. Robinson's performance was believable and Ms. Bennet was beautiful and just as realistic as two people desperate to cover up a crime. This is a film that I highly recommend. It's suspenseful and dramatic. I felt as though I was on a roller coaster ride and couldn't get off. In short, I was a nervous wreck wondering how this film would play out. I highly recommend this one. I almost passed it by but I am eternally grateful that I didn't. Rent it, buy it, but by all means, watch it!!

The lead character, Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson), is a middle-age absent-minded professor who teaches a course in crime. For relaxation he meets with two other middle-age men for drinks and academic conversation. Surrounded by books and dim light, the three men talk about how stodgy their lives are, how averse they are to adventure, and how alluring the woman is whose portrait they see in a nearby shop's window.

Says Richard to his two friends: "you know, even if the spirit of adventure should rise up before me and beckon, even in the form of that alluring young woman in the window next door, I'm afraid all I'd do is clutch my coat a little tighter, mutter something idiotic, and run like the devil."

This story setup, with quiet, reflective, sedentary characters, gives the film's surprise ending credibility. With a different setup, with different characters, the film's ending, as is, would be an act of creative malfeasance. But here, it works.

And Richard's excellent adventure is spellbinding. Tension is maximized because we, as viewers, are put directly in the point of view of Richard and his predicament. What would we do in such a situation? How would we react?

I wouldn't have cast Edward G. Robinson in the lead role. But he certainly does a nice job. So does Joan Bennett, as the woman in the window. The film's plot is tight, except in the second half, in a couple of sequences involving a blackmailer.

"The Woman In The Window" is a clever, well-written, character driven story about a man whose infatuation with a beautiful woman's portrait drives him into a dangerous adventure. Once the viewer has seen the ending, the power of the plot vanishes. But even then, that ending is still thought-provoking.

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.

I'd say that this is the point where Fritz Lang was firmly planting his feet in the film noir genre. Made in the same year as Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, it's a formational film to the genre, using shadows extensively, as Lang had been doing since his silent days, while getting its main character in the middle of a murder plot where he can't go to the police. It intelligently straddles a line between philosophical and suspenseful before managing to be both tragic and comic in its final moments. I'm not entire sure that ending works, but I can't deny that it tickles me, nonetheless.

Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) is a philosophy professor who discusses the nature of murder with his class the day his wife and children go off into the country for a vacation, leaving him alone in the city for a few weeks. He jokes with his friends at his club, the district attorney Frank Lalor (Raymond Massey) and Dr. Michael Barkstane (Edmund Breon), about how his newfound freedom saying that looking for adventure is the work of young men, not a man in his middle age. They talk about the unknown woman in a portrait in the window next to their club as the centerpiece of this discussion, and Wanley laughs it off. He's going to have another drink and go home to bed.

And yet, leaving the club, he meets the model of the portrait while admiring it. This is Alice Reed (Joan Bennett, sans awful cockney accent from Man Hunt), and Wanley is so tickled by meeting her that he agrees to an innocent drink with her. That drink in a public place becomes a trip up to her apartment to see the original sketches for the portrait, something that we believe Wanley is only there for. He's no lecher. He's being polite and interested in a young woman, is all. As he sits on her couch, waiting for her to bring in the sketches from the other room, a man bursts into the apartment and immediately attacks Wanley. Wanley defends himself while the man has his hands on Wanley's throat, and stabs him in the back with scissors that Alice hands him. He's killed someone. The academic talk about murder and the idle conversation of adventure have caught up with him.

No matter how innocent Wanley's intentions may have been, it all looks awful. The night his wife leaves town, he's in the apartment of an attractive young woman alone where he kills her lover. This is not something to take to the police, especially if he thinks he's smart enough to outwit them. It's interesting to watch what essentially amounts to a police procedural decades before CSI became a television mainstay. The little things that Wanley does wrong end up feeling like glaring mistakes, but forensics hadn't been popularized in any way, shape, or form by 1944, so Wanley not thinking of a tear of a fiber from his coat is understandable. What's a couple of fibers? It's not that important.

Except, of course, it is, and the middle bulk of the film is Wanley negotiating his status as the killer with his friendship of Lalor, the DA, and getting an inside scoop into the investigation, knowing how tightly the noose is getting around his neck with every passing moment. It's more sedate and methodically paced that something made today would be, but it's still effective in portraying the feeling of the walls closing in that never quite stops, especially when the added wrinkle of Heidt (Dan Duryea) appears.

The man Wanley killed was a powerful tycoon who kept his relationship with Alice secret, but his company was keeping tabs on Wanley through the bodyguard and tracker Heidt, an amoral hood who waits for the right moment after the crime to approach Alice and blackmail her. Wanley has to help, of course, and the two agree to murder Heidt to protect themselves. This movie is at its best here in the scenes between Alice and Heidt. The threat around Wanley is less immediate while the threat that Heidt represents Alice is more immediate, and Joan Bennett plays these scenes really well. She's terrified but hiding it under a cool, feminine exterior that's trying to exude confidence and calm while she knows that Heidt has everything on her and isn't the kind of guy to mess with.

The finale is a kind of mixture of coincidence that feels arbitrary and easy at first combined with tragic timing that makes up for it. And then, the film plays switcheroo on the whole movie, moving from a tragic ending to a comic one, and I lean towards it working. The dark of the proto-noir ending as bleakly as possible gives way to an amusing ending that pokes fun at itself, treating the film like a lesson to learn from for its main character instead of a firm final moment. It's like the ending of Fury, except it ends with a laugh instead of catharsis. In addition, like Fury, I don't think it undermines the overall point of the film, it just stands in such stark contrast to the rest of the film that it's somewhat shocking, especially on a first viewing (this is my second, the first was the horribly colorized version on Prime and I want to burn it with fire).

The methodical nature it deals with the police investigation may date the film, but it has the more immediate effect of proving to Wanley that he is running out of time and space to breathe, which is important. It's Joan Bennett that has the greatest emotional effect, though, her scenes with Dan Duryea being quietly intense as a lot goes on beneath the surface.

Lang manages it all well, especially in Alice's apartment. There's a lot of use of mirrors that allows for really interesting compositions, including two people looking directly at each other while allowing the camera to see both faces at the same time in the same shot. He was also working with a writer/producer individual (Nunnally Johnson) for the second time in a row, so it'd be interesting to see what the film would have become had Lang been given more freedom. It doesn't quite fit the rest of his work thematically, a similar distance created in Ministry of Fear, but he entertains well because he was a professional who understood the medium really well.