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The Woman in the Window

Here’s a film with a dream-like look that’s really more like machinery greasing for Scarlet Street. Nothing in The Woman in the Window is bad, really, but the ending is a cheat and nullifies everything that had gone before it. This bait-and-switch ending also leaves the film, stylistically noir in all the right places even if it never wears these tropes too comfortably, on a jokey final note.

The Woman in the Window starts off with a middle-aged college professor ruminating on adventurousness, a path never taken, and the portrait of a beautiful woman hanging in the shop window next door to their club. He then proceeds to fall asleep in the club. It’s a bit of a sludge introduction to wade through, but once he meets the model from the portrait, murders her lover in an act of defense and proceeds to crumble under his guilt and her emotional manipulations, the film picks up speed and our interest.

Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett do solid, admirable work in their parts, and Raymond Massey provides a nice flair in a key supporting role. But the big reveal in The Woman in the Window, which I won’t reveal here, turns a harrowing trip through one man’s degradation and indulgence in his secretly violent and brutal sides becomes defanged. The reveal is done with a nice series of camera tricks, but it left me cold to the film as a whole. This is a film that could have been among the most potent and stylish of noirs, but it ends up being a solidly made crime-tinged melodrama.
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Added by JxSxPx
11 years ago on 5 March 2013 20:02