Look in Any Window

Singer and teen idol Elvis Presley got big budget musicals to work on. Singer and teen idol Pat Boone got to work on big budget movies. However, singer and teen idol Paul Anka got "Look In Any Window" among the few (and equally low budget) movie offers he got. Watching it, one has to admire the guts of Anka to appear in a movie where he plays a mentally disturbed teenager who likes to peep in the windows of his neighbors. I have to wonder what Anka's teen followers thought of Anka after watching this, though I am pretty confident in guessing what they thought of the movie as a whole. Despite its lurid description, the movie is pretty boring for the most part. Anka doesn't get to do much peeping, and he's actually off- screen for large chunks of time. It's no wonder this movie is pretty hard to find.

"Look in Any Window" is a cheap, sleazy exploitation film about the shenanigans going on behind the scenes in suburban America. While it could have been well made and intelligent, the filmmakers really just wanted sensationalism. However, despite being pretty crass, it is entertaining.

The film is like a soap opera and it consists of many different vignettes involving really screwed up people. The most obviously messed up person is Craig, played by Paul Anka. He is an out of work teen who loves peeking in windows. Eventually, his behavior escalates and the police are looking to find him. His father is emotionally and physically impotent and the film is trying to say this is why the young man is a creepy sex offender...which is a bit of a stretch. As for nearly all the adults in the film, they seem to love cheating on their spouses and are too wrapped up in themselves to notice that Craig is a real head case!

The film often features very broad acting that is anything but subtle. The worst of these is played by Alex Nicol, who is Craig's alcoholic father. Subtle, he is not! But none of the characters seemed subtle...not even the cops investigating the peeping Tom case! I am a bit surprised the film didn't cast Jayne Mansfield or Mamie Van Doren as well...they would have fit right in to the story. Overall, a bad but fun movie...the type you watch if you could use a laugh or if you like over-the-top stories.

This little 1961 movie has a trashy feeling to it, not helped by its very low budget. Yet it has a kind of sincerity as well, of the sort one used to find in high school civics classes. It's an odd mix of a movie, worth watching once. It's evocative of its era, the waning of the Eisenhower years, just past, and the start of the New Frontier, just beginning. The movie has the conservative mood of the fifties in some scenes, while in other respects it feels almost like a low budget attempt to make a Euopean-style art film in America. Director William Alland's style suggests a touch of Nicholas Ray here, a little John Cassavettes there, with a dash of John Frankenheimer and Arthur Penn thrown in for good measure.

Okay, enough name dropping. From what I recall of the story it revolves around a troubled teen (Paul Anka) who has become a "peeing tom", a voyeur in other words. What drives him seems not to be sexual urges so much as a desire to understand what "normal" is (I'm with you there, Paul). In this sense the story, though semi-sensational for its day, must come off as a little sad today. Since I haven't seen the film in decades I can't say for sure. As at least an attempt to probe into the true nature of dysfunctional or, if you will, troubled families, the film deserves praise for at least bringing the (at the time) hot topic up in the first place.

It's too bad that Paul Anka wasn't much of an actor. What's worse, there's something unappealing about him, not quite creepy but unsympathetic, that makes his troubled teen come off as stranger than he should. As the hypocritical grownups, Ruth Roman, Alex Nicol and, especially Jack Cassidy, are all fine. The latter is surprisingly unhammy, and his playing here much stronger than it would be a decade later, when his acting got slicker and somewhat campy. I find his work in the movie actually touching at times, which is not, I suspect, what the actor or director intended.

A teenager terrorizes his neighborhood by prowling around at night wearing a mask.

Paul Anka plays Craig the troubled teen, he also sings the title song which takes on a weird creepy feeling when played while he wanders aimlessly around town , stopping to look at romance magazines. It was not a hit though Anka had several successful songs around that time. His mother is played by Ruth Roman, a sexy and flirtatious woman and his father is a weak alcoholic (Alex Nicol). There is also an odd couple pair of cops looking into the prowling case, one a veteran who believes in beating confessions out of suspects and his young partner who is more understanding since he studied psychology.

This is a strangely effective film is made more sleazy because of the low budget and being filmed in black and white. It is almost like a David Lynch film if he were making films in the early 1960s. It is hard to find, I own it on a VHS copy made by the video company The Fang. It was transferred from a jumpy 16mm copy. This is worth seeing if you like low budget films about the darker, more lurid side of suburbia in the 1960s.

People can comment all they want about this being low, sleazy, sensationalistic, et cetera, but I found it a very thought provoking and disturbing film. Paul Anka's character Craig Fowler seemed to be such a great symbol as the neighbor Carlo (played by George Dolenz) explains, of the evils of everyone who voyeurs hours away watching the lives of strange people the media tells us are so important. Craig is soon unmasked, and it tells the characters they are as guilty as he might be to give him bad examples that feed his endless urge to spy and pry. Citizen Kane might have given William Alland some material to use for this movie since he played a reporter there who was always watching the drama unfold with his back turned to hide what he looked like. Plus, it always gave me a tent pole in junior high school to watch Jack Cassidy kiss Ruth Roman in the car before they sped away to Las Vegas.