OVP: The Woman in the Window (1944)

Film: The Woman in the Window (1944)
Stars: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, Dan Duryea
Director: Fritz Lang
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)...for the 1945 Oscars, so we're using that tag below since tags follow the OVP, even though the film was released in November 1944.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.

You're going to see a lot of classic (or below-the-line) classic movies with our month-long tribute to film noir, but you might wonder why I started with this particular picture, and I wish I had a better counter to make than "it was first chronologically"...but I don't.  I saw this one first because I couldn't find a more binding theme without getting into the twists and turns of noir, one of the few Classic Hollywood genres that genuinely has surprises in the plot formula.  After watching The Woman in the Window (no relation to the novel by AJ Finn which is being made into a movie with Amy Adams & Gary Oldman later this year), though, I think it's the perfect film to kick off our tribute to noir.  Sneaky, beautifully-acted, and with enough twists to both comment on the brilliance of film noir (and point out the clearest flaw of the genre), The Woman in the Window is pretty much everything I love about the genre wrapped into one 99-minute package.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers on a married psychology professor Richard Wanley (Robinson) whose wife and family are out-of-town and he's being egged on by a few coworkers to make the most of his temporary bachelorhood by pursuing a woman while he's alone.  He demurs, saying his randy days are over, but soon meets the subject of a beautiful painting that he's walked by earlier in the film, Alice Reed (Bennett), who invites him back to her place for "drinks."  The movie then takes a sharp turn as Alice's lover finds them, and tries to murder Wanley in a jealous rage, when Alice kills the lover to save Wanley's life.  However, it's obvious at this point that no one would believe that they didn't kill the man, so he attempts to cover up the crime by driving the man to the middle of nowhere, dumping the body, and hoping to ensure that they get away with it.  This doesn't work out, and Wanley gets a firsthand account of what he did wrong as he's invited by a mutual friend to watch DA Lalor (Massey) track down the killer, not knowing that it's Wanley himself who committed the crime.  There's a great subplot involving Dan Duryea playing a blackmailer who also makes some cheap passes at Alice (even though she's trying to poison him) before we get to the movie's controversial ending.

1944 was essentially the beginning of film noir as a mainstream Hollywood entity.  While it had certainly been prevalent in previous years with movies like The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key, 1944 brought about what would be four staples of the genre: Double Indemnity, Laura, Murder My Sweet, and of course The Woman in the Window.  Most of what we see here is classic, standard-fare film noir tropes, with a beautiful woman (Bennett) bringing an honorable man (Robinson) down while the law (Massey) is watching.  The movie rises above just being a prototype, though, with bravura work from all involved.  Robinson was such a good actor (truly one of the best performers never cited for an Oscar), and has great rapport with Bennett despite not having the traditional leading man good looks of a Dana Andrews or Tyrone Power.  I liked Bennett (though I've always been a bit more partial to her sister Constance), and thought Dan Duryea was fabulous as the blackmailing Heidt, giving us all of the nasty villainy that we're lacking from the seemingly "good people" played by Bennett & Robinson.  The movie won one Oscar nomination, for Best Score, and it definitely deserved it-Hugo Friedhofer creates an atmospheric, moody piece that totally matches the desperation of the main characters and plot.

The problem with the film is the ending, and it's why we're going with 4 stars rather than 5 here, as it would have assuredly gotten to five with a better finale.  The film likely was precluded by the censors from ending with Eddie Robinson, having just moments earlier gotten away with the murder (thanks to a series of circumstances outside his control, the cops had come to believe it was Duryea's Heidt, not Wanley or Alice, who had killed the lover), killing himself after going down his slow march to hell, a desperate Joan Bennett running to try and stop him.  However, we instead got a hackneyed dream sequence (which was probably not all that hackneyed in 1944, but still feels cheap) where we learn all of the preceding events had been an illusion, and we get a comic piece at the end with Robinson seeing another beautiful woman in front of a shop window who wants a light, and him running in fear from her for fear that the dream will become reality.  I don't like "it was all a dream" sort of plot laziness, but there's too much good here to say that the movie is ruined by its ending.  However, the finale stops it from being the true masterpiece it probably should have been.

Other Articles: Intro to Film Noir Month