The Window

There’s an absolutely wonderful little suspense film just waiting to seduce you with its web of film noir charms. It’s called The Window. Clocking in at a mere 73-minutes, The Window was a surprise critical and box office hit for RKO Pictures when it was released in 1949.

Based on a short story by the great American crime writer Cornell Woolrich—who also wrote the short story upon which Alfred Hitchcock based his classic film Rear Window—The Window has a nifty premise. Woolrich took the Aesop’s fable about the “boy who cried wolf” and updated its setting to the cramped tenement jungle of post-World War II New York where it’s a scorching, hot summer and an impoverished young couple named Ed and Mary Woodry are struggling to make ends meet.

Things are hard for the Woodrys, which may explain why their young son Tommy often escapes into his imagination, making up colorful lies about his life. His parents are loving, but they are weary of Tommy’s make-believe storytelling, and they order him to stop. Like the good son he is, Tommy swears that he’ll never tell another lie. Then something bad happens that changes everything.

One night, it’s so hot that Tommy leaves his bedroom to sleep out on the fire escape in the hope of catching a breeze. Bad idea--because while he’s there, he peers through the window of the upstairs apartment just as the husband and wife who live there murder a man. Horrified, Tommy rushes to tell his parents what he’s seen. Of course, because he’s known for his habitual lying, they don’t believe him. 

In true nightmare fashion, the more Tommy insists that he’s telling the truth, the worse things get for him. His mother takes him upstairs to apologize to the neighbors about the awful lie he’s telling about them. The husband and wife smile and forgive Tommy for his overactive imagination. But as soon as Tommy and his mother leave, the couple decides that the boy knows too much…and must die.

The terror of a helpless child in a world where no adults believe that he's really in peril has rarely been so vividly brought to life.

What follows is a sinister chess game between the frightened boy and his real-life wolves. The terror of a helpless child in a world where no adults believe that he’s really in peril has rarely been so vividly brought to life. It’s a dark vision made all the more real by the film’s stark, low-budget production, and its use of actual Brooklyn locations.

While Arthur Kennedy, Paul Stewart, and the entire cast are exceptional, it’s 12-year-old Bobby Driscoll who really shines. Driscoll was awarded a special Academy Award for his compelling performance as Tommy.

I give The Window four out of four stars. Born out of Aesop, by way of Cornell Woolrich and the savvy filmmakers at RKO, it’s a gripping film noir treat.