La Femme au portrait

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.

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

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.

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.

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.