Review by Roger Carpenter
By 1944 Fritz Lang was already known as one of the greatest film directors of all time. Although he was unable to find steady work in the 1950’s (due mostly to his reputation of being difficult to work with and abusive to cast and crew), he had already created classics such as Destiny, Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, the Die Nibelungen epic, Metropolis, and M.
Escaping from Nazi Germany after turning down Joseph Goebbels for the position of Director of the German Cinema Institute, Lang came to Hollywood where he directed numerous film noir classics like Scarlet Street and The Big Heat. The Woman in the Window was made the year before one of his biggest American hits, Scarlet Street.
The Woman in the Window stars Edward G. Robinson as Professor Richard Wanley, perhaps the most unlikely middle-aged man ever to be hit on by a beautiful woman. Nevertheless, Joan Bennet, as Alice Reed, does just that. Meeting some friends for dinner and drinks, Wanley is entranced by a portrait of a beautiful woman next door to the meeting place. He is reluctantly pulled away by his friends but as he steps out several hours later to head home, he is drawn to the portrait again. As he stares at the “woman in the window” he suddenly becomes aware of someone nearby…the real-life woman from the portrait.
As luck would have it, Wanley has just seen his wife and young son off for the summer, and though the two swear to each other they are simply interested in good company, one drink turns into several, and by the end of the evening, Wanley is in Reed’s apartment. But before the rest of the evening can be played out, Reed’s jealous lover barges in and, enraged at discovering another man in the apartment, begins to strangle Wanley. Wanley manages to reach a pair of scissors—with a little help from Reed—and accidentally kills the lover during the struggle.
Needless to say, both Wanley and Reed are shocked at this turn of events. Fearing the police won’t believe the story, and neither wanting to ruin their lives over the death of the scoundrel who attacked them both, the pair hatch a scheme whereby Wanley gets rid of the body. Of course, Wanley is no wanton murderer, so even as he dumps the body he makes numerous mistakes which the police pick up later on as leads. It doesn’t help that the victim ends up being a wealthy and famous personality, so when he ends up missing, the papers pick up the sensational story. As if that’s not enough, one of Wanley’s good friends is the district attorney (Raymond Massey as Frank Lalor), who doggedly pursues the case, running into tantalizing bits of evidence that keep pointing to Wanley. Thankfully for Wanley, Lalor can’t begin to conceive of his friend as a killer and keeps writing the clues off as nothing more than funny coincidences. However, Mr. Heidt (Dan Duryea), knows the truth and is blackmailing the would-be lovers for $5,000 to keep silent on the matter. Will the district attorney finally stop ignoring the evidence and finger Wanley as the killer? Will Heidt get his money and keep his word? And will Wanley and Reed be able to trust each other enough to keep this secret until the circus surrounding them both dies down? These are the essential questions to the film.
While Lang was a master of crime films and Woman in the Window certainly falls into the genre of noir, the film borders on the comedic time and again—perhaps unintentionally. Even by the standards of 1944, many of the supposed gaffes Wanley makes must have been eye-rollers for contemporary audiences. Wanley rolls the body into a carpet and carries it to his car in the middle of the night. Even as he is dumping the body in his backseat, this viewer was wondering, “why not the trunk?” Yet not only does Wanley leave the body in the back seat, but he returns the rug to Reed’s apartment. So now he has an exposed corpse lying in his back seat. And, as many of us do late at night in the midst of rainstorms, we forget to turn on our headlights. So it’s no surprise when Wanley gets pulled over. But the policemen gives only a cursory glance into the back seat (should have noted the corpse) and allows Wanley off with merely a warning.
And so begins a series of missteps by Wanley—and missed opportunities by the police—that set the film into motion. There are plenty more: Wanley gets a horrible case of poison ivy from the place in the woods where he dropped the body and ends up at the exact location with his friend the district attorney, who laughingly notes it looks like Wanley could have done the deed; a piece of fabric is caught in the barbed wire fence Wanley stumbled into in the dark woods, and it’s again noted by the police. Several other interesting coincidences are discovered, but the district attorney, the detectives, and Wanley himself joke about it because no one can conceive that Wanley, a mild-mannered professor, could commit such a heinous deed.
Though these sequences were simply trite and over-used in the mid-1940’s, today the film runs the risk of unintentional comedy for audiences jaded by these tropes. That being said, Lang directs the film at such a rollicking pace that the absurdity of it all can be dismissed in lieu of sitting back and watching the fun roll across the screen. And that’s what Woman in the Window is: pure fun. It’s fantasy. There is no way a beautiful woman such as Alice Reed (and Joan Bennett as Reed is fairly stunning here) would pick up a middle-class, middle-aged, and not particularly good-looking man. As the absurdities mount, the viewer can’t help being caught up in the plot, waiting to see how these two will escape all the blunders they have made.
For all its old-fashioned and overused plot devices, Woman in the Window is still great entertainment—so much so that all the major stars would return with Lang the following year to make an even more important noir classic, Scarlet Street.
For those fans of Lang who have only seen his German films—most of which are mega-classics of early cinema—his later output, including Woman in the Window, is well worth tracking down and viewing, too. Woman in the Window has been released by Kino Lorber on Blu-ray. While the special features are thin, with only the film’s trailer and audio commentary accompanying the disc, the commentary is as much fun as the film. Created by film historian Imogene Sara Smith, her running comments are both enlightening and entertaining as well.
For those interested in Lang’s later output or classic film noir, this disc is likely to be a “must own.” You can purchase the disc directly from Kino Lorber at kinolorber.com or through Amazon.
