The Woman in the Window (1944)

USA, 107 minutes
Director: Fritz Lang
Writers: Nunnally Johnson, J.H. Wallis
Photography: Milton R. Krasner
Music: Arthur Lange, Hugo Friedhofer, Bruno Mason, Charles Maxwell
Editors: Marjorie Fowler, Gene Fowler Jr., Thomas Pratt
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea, Raymond Massey, Edmund Breon, Arthur Loft, Spanky McFarland, Robert Blake

The ending of The Woman in the Window was a personal brainchild of director Fritz Lang and not forced on him by any grasping or monolithic studio head. I'm about to give it away wholesale right off the bat so here's your spoiler alert, 75 years late. The ending has produced groans and derision as flawed, improbable, clichéd, whatever. It was all a dream. None of it ever happened. In DC Comics parlance, it's "An Imaginary Tale!" Sure, it's corny, especially the sitcom way it plays out in the last minutes, complete with goofy music, once Professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) wakes and realizes he has somehow won a redemption, scurrying away like a reprieved rat. But my view is closer to the Halliwell's film guide, which takes it with equanimity, saying the ending "can now be seen as a decorative extra to a story which had already ended satisfactorily."

I want to go even further and call The Woman in the Window one of the better dream movies we have, certainly for the era, dreams being a narrative form that movies can somehow be particularly good at: specifically, in this case, the absurd nightmare that starts with one small wrong decision. This movie is full of those "now how did this happen?" kind of moments that populate dream states out of control, from ill preparation for critically important tests to nudity on an NBA basketball court to never being able to run away. More importantly, perhaps, after the weak efforts of Lang toward war morale messaging of his two previous movies, Ministry of Fear and Hangmen Also Die!, he shrunk the scale to make a tidy American domestic film noir drama whose ambitions generally do not go beyond causing viewers' nerve ends to shriek with practically every developing scene. The Woman in the Window is good at the dream state, that's my own contention, but everyone agrees it's good at drawing out anxiety. If like me that's your idea of entertainment, come and get it.



It's a simple story. Professor Wanley has been abandoned in the city by his wife and two children going away on a summer holiday. Cue the jokes about nutty bachelor antics and staid middle-aged men. Professor Wanley shares dinner and cigars at a private walnut-paneled club with his friends, a doctor (Edmund Breon) and district attorney Frank Lalor (Raymond Massey), and they crack jokes about a painting of an attractive woman in a nearby storefront window. At the end of the evening Professor Wanley pays one more visit to the painting in the window—and then the subject of it, Alice Reed (Joan Bennett), suddenly sidles up by his side, giving him the old come on. Next thing you know Wanley is in her place and they're having a drink. Then a guy busts in, Claude Mazard (Arthur Loft). He's big and he's mad! Without a word he attacks Professor Wanley. They struggle. Reed hands Wanley a pair of scissors. From an extremely awkward position, Wanley stabs Mazard. He's dead!

Just like that. It happens so fast, and is presented so realistically—in high film noir—that it's easy to miss how full of holes and dreamlike it is. Later we find out Mazard is a famous wealthy unscrupulous business mogul of some kind and Alice Reed is his girlfriend, or one of them. But Reed claims to not know his real name—she knew him as Frank Howard (when the Frank Howard we know from baseball was 8). What is Reed doing wandering the streets picking up middle-aged softies like Professor Wanley? That would be the first question. Film code, censors, blah blah, obviously obscure the simple answer, that she is a prostitute, but really, would someone in Reed's fancy Manhattan apartment with a rich boyfriend still be walking the streets like that? Compare the apartment of the street prostitute in Eyes Wide Shut, or even Joan Bennett's first place in Scarlet Street. These are sincere questions. How can Reed not know Howard is Mazard as he seems so recognizable to others? Why does Reed hand Wanley the scissors—how would her boyfriend Mazard feel about that if he won the fight? The tale of the tape already favors him. How does Wanley even manage to use the scissors to kill Mazard? Wanley barely seems to break a sweat in the altercation. All his hanky mopping seems to be more about nervous agitation.

But here we are in the grip of film noir pacing now and things are happening fast. If Wanley and Reed report the killing to the police Wanley is ruined. There's a good chance if they work together they can get away with it so naturally that's what they decide to do. Lots of logistical plot business with a parade of expert suspense setups follow: disposing of Mazard's body, some cat and mouse between Wanley and his friend DA Lalor, and then a blackmailer (the ever oily Dan Duryea) showing up to hassle Reed. At that point, Wanley and Reed conferring, they make the decision to kill the blackmailer. Wanley is calmly straightforward about it but this is a deceptively critical point where his character turns to cold-blooded killer. It's a brief piece of dialogue but it punches hard.

Then the blackmailer not only foils Reed's attempt to poison him but catches her at what she's doing. Now he's mad—for a minute there he thought he had a chance with her, had dreams of going away with her somewhere nice with the money and living it up. He slaps her around and tells her he wants another $5,000 within another 24 hours. Professor Wanley does not take this news well when Reed calls to tell him. He can feel the walls closing in now. After hearing from Reed he uses the rest of the poison and kills himself before he finds out they are actually out of it because, in a really improbable development, the skittish blackmailer has opened fire in the street when he sees a policeman. The blackmailer is not only shot dead at the scene, but he's instantly taken by police and the DA as the most likely murderer of Mazard.

So they were in the clear after all but it's too late for Professor Wanley. It's such a neat moral resolution—the bad men are punished, the good man punishes himself, and the blank slate of Alice Reed survives, although no doubt we are intended to see her as equally guilty of any and all criminal activity (in an Eve kind of way if nothing else). Perhaps that's part of the impulse to tack on the dream explanation, retire her back to her anonymous suspicious lifestyle with prejudice. Bennett is excellent, best when she is seized completely by panic. She seems most innocent and human in those moments. Robinson's days as a leading man were ending, but he pulls it off here with a good deal of grace. And a bunch of these people, including Robinson, Bennett, Duryea, DP Milton R. Krasner, and Lang too, evidently liked working together so much they went out and made another movie just as good or better, Scarlet Street.