The Woman in the Window (1944) film review
A review by John A. Walker (2009), the author of Art & Artists on screen.
This black-and-white International Pictures Inc / RKO production is an example of American film noir that has much in common with a subsequent film entitled Scarlet Street. Both were directed by the Austrian-born Fritz Lang and starred Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea. The plots of the two films were also similar and both featured fine art and femme fatales.
In The Woman in the Window, Edward G. Robinson plays Professor Richard Wanley, a staid, middle-aged, college professor who lectures on criminal psychology. He is a married man with two children but his family departs for a summer vacation at the beginning of the film. While they are away, Richard plans to have dinner each evening at his club with two friends, one of whom is a doctor and the other a district attorney.
By chance, Richard becomes entangled with Alice Reed (Bennett), a rich man’s mistress. He first encounters her when she stands beside him while he is gazing at her framed portrait displayed in a window of an art gallery next to his club. Images of beautiful women cast a spell over many men and Richard is no exception. He is naturally startled when he sees a double image— a reflection of Alice alongside her painted features. The portrait, as it were, has come alive.
Richard and Alice end up in her apartment to have drinks and look at sketches where an angry and jealous man interrupts them. He turns out to be Claude Mazard (Arthur Loft), a well-known financier who is secretly keeping Alice. Claude attacks Richard with murderous intent. Alice hands Richard some scissors to defend himself and he kills the financier. Although Richard acted in self-defence, he and Alice suspect the police will not believe them and they both fear a public scandal. They decide to conceal the manslaughter and to dispose of the body. Richard dumps it in woods during the middle of the night.
Richard tries to maintain a façade of normality but his life is stressful because during his evenings at the club, his DA friend Frank Lalor (Raymond Massey) keeps him abreast of the progress of the police investigation of the case. Then the financier’s bodyguard Heidt (Duryea), a crooked ex-cop, guesses the truth and begins to blackmail Alice and Richard. By now desperate, they decide to murder Heidt but the scheme fails. Finally, the police save them by shooting Heidt dead in the street. On his body, detectives discover evidence he took from Alice’s apartment that implies that Heidt murdered Claude.
The script, written by Nunnally Johnson, was adapted from the 1942 popular thriller Once off guard by J.H. Wallis. In the novel, Richard is so troubled by guilt that he commits suicide but this was too gloomy an ending for Hollywood and so a preposterous new ending was devised in which Richard drinks some poison but then wakes up in his club to discover the whole story had been a nightmare.
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