Always Window Shopping

The Woman in the Window (1944) continues our Edward G. Robinson festival. It's another one that puts Robinson in a kind of professor role, then makes him a killer.

It starts with Prof. Robinson putting his wife and children on a train for their summer vacation (shades of Seven-Year Itch!). He heads to his club to meet some friends for dinner, but stops outside to look in the window of an art gallery. There is a painting of a beautiful woman, and his friends come along and see him admiring it. They've fallen in love with her too. Over drinks after dinner, they talk about being summer bachelors, and talk about going to a night club. Robinson says he has to get up early for a lecture, and they say that the peaceful, contented life is best. But Robinson disagrees: He has a that life and wishes he had more adventure. They leave him in the club reading.

When he leaves, he stops to look at the painting for a bit. But beside it, he sees a a floating face, the face of the beautiful model. It's a spooky shot, director Fritz Lang's best in the picture. He realizes that the face is a reflection in the window, and model Joan Bennett is behind him. All that talk earlier about being more adventurous? It gets him in the mood to chat with her and accept her invitation back to her place to see some more of her art.

That is not a euphemism, by the way.

But a man busts into the apartment, decides that Robinson is horning in, and attacks Robinson. In the scuffle, Robinson kills him. Even though Bennett assures him it was self-defense, he knows that just being found in her apartment will ruin him. So they plan to get rid of the body and pretend it never happened. She doesn't know his name, so she can't blackmail him, and he can't turn her in without compromising himself. As long as he doesn't leave any clues.

Of course, she lifts his monogrammed pencil, and sees his picture in the paper the next day (he won an academic award, of course). Also, one of his buddies from the club, Raymond Massie, is a homicide detective who offers to bring him along to investigate a body that has been found. And there are a ton of clues: tire tracks, foot prints, fibers and blood on the barbed wire fence, and so on. Plus Robinson seems to be making some very accurate guesses about how the victim was killed. Then it turns out that that weasel Dan Duryea was maybe a witness.

Lang puts together a neat little puzzle here, with an ingenious and ingeniously filmed happy ending.