Fritz Lang (1944)
SPOILER WARNING: There’s already one of these on the home page, explaining that I don’t normally put warnings on individual reviews. In this particular case, doing so seems only fair. …
In The Woman in the Window’s opening scene, Richard Wanley (Edward G Robinson), assistant professor of psychology at New York’s Gotham College, is delivering a lecture to his students on the varieties of homicide. ‘The man who kills in self-defence …,’ declares Wanley, ‘must not be judged by the same standards applied to the man who kills for gain’. Later that day, after seeing his wife (Dorothy Peterson) and children off on vacation, Wanley goes for dinner at his club with two friends and contemporaries, Frank Lalor (Raymond Massey), a district attorney, and Michael Barkstane (Edmund Breon), a medical doctor. As they talk afterwards, Wanley humorously laments his middle age and declining appetite for risk-taking. On their way into the club, all three men had been struck by a portrait of a beautiful young woman in the window of a neighbouring shop. ‘Even if the spirit of adventure should rise up before me and beckon,’ Wanley now tells the others, ‘even in the form of that alluring young woman in the window next door, I’m afraid that all I’ll do is clutch my coat a little tighter, mutter something idiotic and run like the devil’.
When his friends have taken their leave, Wanley sits down with a book in the club’s reading room. He asks Collins (Frank Dawson), the steward, to remind him when it’s 10.30 pm and Collins obliges. Wanley leaves the club and, as he does so, looks again at the portrait in the window. To his amazement, a young woman (Joan Bennett), a dead ringer for the subject of the painting, appears in the glass of the window, then in the street beside him. Introducing herself as Alice Reed, she confirms that she did indeed sit for the portrait. Within a couple of screen minutes, Wanley has accepted an invitation to go back to Alice’s apartment for a drink. Their friendly conversation there is interrupted by the arrival of another man (Arthur Loft) who angrily sets about Wanley. The professor grabs a pair of scissors and, in self-defence, stabs and kills the man.
With Alice’s help, Wanley then gets to work disposing of the corpse. The dead man was known to Alice, his mistress, as Frank Howard but his real name is Claude Mazard and he was a crooked financier. Frank Lalor is involved in the investigation of the crime, alongside the local police chief Jackson (Thomas E Jackson). After asking Wanley for a psychological insight into the mind of the killer, Lalor takes his nervous friend along to the site where Mazard’s body has been found. Alice, meanwhile, is blackmailed by Mazard’s former bodyguard Heidt (Dan Duryea), who saw her entering the apartment building with Wanley, but the ex-bodyguard is Jackson’s and Lalor’s prime suspect. After Alice has failed to silence him with an overdose of the sleeping tablets Dr Barkstane has prescribed for the understandably insomniac Wanley, Heidt is killed in a shootout with the police. Too late, it seems, to save Wanley, though. When Alice tries to call him with the news about Heidt, there’s no reply. Wanley has taken the rest of the sleeping tablets and is slumped in his chair – apparently dead, until a man’s voice wakes him from his doze, telling him it’s 10.30 pm.
It-was-only-a-dream stories usually feel like a copout. This one, written by Nunnally Johnson (who adapted a novel called Once Off Guard by J H Wallis), is an exception. The twist in the tale is satisfying for several reasons. Perhaps most important, Edward G Robinson, relaxed and funny in the early scenes, is so convincingly distraught by the chance event that suddenly and completely ruins Richard Wanley’s life that you can hardly believe he doesn’t go straight to the police, rather than try to conceal the crime. (The weight of guilt continues to press heavily on Robinson, though he never loses his wit.) Besides, it feels so unjust that this should have happened to the decent Wanley, who’s far from a self-satisfied, safe-in-his-ivory-tower kind of academic. It’s only right, in other words, that it didn’t happen.
The book Wanley takes from the club’s library shelves before his doze is a copy of that unique Old Testament document, the Song of Songs – unique because it’s a celebration of erotic love, with poetry well equipped to conjure up the femme fatale that is Alice Reed. Wanley dreams himself a coherent film noir (shot and lit by Milton R Krasner) but it’s one that includes a few seeming improbabilities. Why does Howard/Mazard arrive outside Alice’s place wearing a straw boater when it’s pouring with rain? He’s a big man: how does Edward G Robinson, who isn’t, manage to get the corpse into a car single-handed? It’s pleasing to be niggled by these things as unrealistic only to finally accept them as elements of a dream. The roles played in it by Lalor (Raymond Massey is easier and more humorous than usual) and Barkstane are similarly convincing.
Fritz Lang’s direction is perfectly judged. He gives Wanley’s nightmare the emotional weight it merits but stops short of melodrama. In the comical epilogue, he shows a light touch that doesn’t curdle into tongue-in-cheek smugness. On his way out of the club, Wanley collects his hat from the cloakroom attendant – Mazard’s doppelgänger. On the steps, the doorman, who’s the spitting image of Heidt, bids Wanley a friendly goodnight. In the street, Wanley pauses briefly by the portrait in the window and a woman passer-by (Iris Adrian) asks him for a light. The professor, as he predicted earlier in the evening, clutches his coat a little tighter, mutters something idiotic (‘Oh, no – thank you – not for a million dollars!’) and heads off hurriedly down the street.
13 December 2019
