Look in Any Window

I'm almost surprised that Paul Anka, who was a hit teen singer when he made this, didn't worry about being type-cast forever as a peeping tom, even though his parents are pretty worthless. Nevertheless, this little exploitation (TEEN) flick about social generation-gap stuff is right on the money, especially since most of the actors were professions.....But this has some creepy (not really sleazy) scenes but they always lead into TRYING TO DEAL WITH THE PROBLEM. The parents are drunks, cheating on their spouses, unattentive, and Paul Anka's character is similar to Tony Perkins in PSYCHO except he's not crazy or a murderer..he's just curious how other people live. Ruth Roman..I won't even go into how "cool" they cast the adults in this (for once) and the teenager characters do a good job.

This is not some Perv movie or anything (even for then) and I'm in my 50's and am an artist and Don't thinks it's some creepy thing...AND THERES VERY little humor to fake it. It's unfortunate how real these families in this little movie were (at the time in America) in an affluent, I guess, neighborhood, with the adults (FOR REAL) kind of being the screw-ups, teen-agers, lost, whatever), but if you can find it. I don't know if it's on DVD or Video, but it's a slice of somebody's life (well told) with a Zero budget..Check it!

Flabby Paul Anna needs love but he's going about it all wrong. He is given a bunch of bad examples. All the adults are in love - with someone else's spouse.

Filmed in the San Fernando Valley town of Reseda. It used to be your basic lower middle class neighborhood. Now it is an absolute dump.

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.

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.