Let me tell you something about The Woman in the Window. She begins this 1944 film as a gallery painting that faces a gentleman’s club…not that type of gentleman’s club, but the old style with the leather armchairs and the cigars. Abnormal psych professor Richard and his friends have decided she’s their dream girl during a relaxed evening at the club, but after reading a bit of the illustrated Song of Songs of Solomon which is for some reason on hand in the lounge…

Richard gazes at the painting and the woman herself steps out of the shadows. Richard feels lonely tonight and so does she, well let’s give her a name, she’s Alice, and yes she and Richard go through the looking glass after an innocent evening of drinks and conversation. The noir portion arises when Alice’s jealous and secretive boyfriend bursts into her lovely apartment and begins strangling Richard, and well, he has to defend himself. So now they have to decide what to do.

A little bit of blackmail later, a deus ex machina with the blackmailer, and then the movie seems to end on a down note, but there’s a twist, another deus etcetera, and I’m not going to tell you what it is. But here are the clues…solve along with me.

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Alice literally can’t exist. We see her as a painting, and then she’s a smiling reflection in the gallery window, which means she would have to be standing behind Richard. But then she emerges from the side of the screen, where she couldn’t physically be. She’s also not like other dames. We keep waiting for her to double cross Richard, but she never does. She hands him the scissors to defend himself with, and then when he goes into the other room to call the police (and decides not to) he emerges to find her standing stricken in the corner of the room, as if she’s in the corner of his mind. It’s a memorable shot. It’s a little creepy. It makes me feel if she doesn’t belong to the real world.

Richard acts as if he’s running a simulation that goes wrong. What if I met the dream girl in the painting? What if she liked me even though I’m getting older? I can’t cheat on my wife (who is conveniently for our story out of town), so I must be punished in increasingly ridiculous ways. He seems to think he can cover up a murder because he studies and lectures on the mind of a killer. But knowing how a criminal thinks isn’t the same thing as knowing how to be one. Every choice he makes is a mistake. He has to hide the boyfriend’s body. He begins by driving with his lights off and gets stopped by a cop, then misses the basket at the toll booth and gets stopped by the attendant, cuts himself on the barbed wire fence where he disposes of the body, the list goes on.  I forgot to mention that one of Richard’s friends is the D.A., and he asks Richard to ride along to visit the scene where the body has been dumped and to see the woman they think is connected, which puts him in the center of the investigation of a murder he’s just committed, but as an observer. What began as a fantasy turned into a nightmare.

The Woman in the Window (the film, not Alice)  is full of humor, such as the banter between Richard and his friends, and the Boy Scout who finds the body, and the whole thing ends with a bit of a punch line. And when you watch this a second time, the fact Richard still hears commercials on the radio is just absurd. No matter what, you can’t get away from commercials.

Edward G, Robinson, who plays Richard, is playing against type, and appears more like the cultured man he was reported to be in life. And Joan Bennett as Alice, the Woman in the Window, actually means him no harm, instead helping Richard with every step of the cover up, and showing a genuine, desperate concern for the man she has befriended. She’s a lonely woman in a dead end relationship, but she wasn’t even trying to get out of it when the end comes suddenly. Despite playing with the genre, you can see director Fritz Lang’s signature. I was in love with the interior of Alice’s apartment, even though it was the scene of a tragedy. It has the look of something I don’t have the vocabulary to explain, but it’s just what I would expect in one of these films, especially the fireplace with the squares all over the outside, and certainly lavish for someone who works as an artist model but can’t afford the paintings. If you watch this for the first time, pay attention to all the visuals of beautiful and varied clocks everywhere. Richard sits down with the book and asks the club waiter to alert him when it’s 10:30, and then there is a clock motif for the rest of the movie.

The Woman In The WIndow is simply not like other noir pictures. Lang decided to change the downbeat ending of the source novel, maybe because he decided to give the audience a break from the turmoil of the times. The resulting film is fun and somehow has become a comfort movie for me. But it still works as a suspense movie. Even though I’ve seen it before, when viewing for the essay, I still got caught up in the tension of whether they would get away with murder. I don’t like to give recommendations, because if I’m talking about a movie it’s an implicit recommendation, But I think that’s the mark of a good movie, if it still involves you emotionally on repeat views even when you know the outcome.

This has been for the Back In Black Noir Blogathon hosted by Hamlette’s Soliloquy and The Midnite Drive-In, and thank you to them for hosting. I’ll link to the blogathon in the description and so be sure to check it out. And until next time remember not to get picked up by women  who go to 11, and have a good night.