Visiting Film Noir: The Window

1949 Film Noir

Directed by Ted Tetzlaff

From RKO Radio Pictures

Starring

Bobby Driscoll

Barbara Hale

Arthur Kennedy

Ruth Roman

Paul Stewart

The boy cried wolf! wolf! several times and each time the people came to help him they found there wasn't any wolf.  

Aesop's Fables

Let's quickly add that this is a very good movie.  It's one of those compelling B film noirs that RKO produced so compellingly that it slips into one's psyche as smoothly as a warm knife through butter.  Even though it's somewhat predictable from start to finish, it matters not because the ride is so entertaining.  And it contains the best performance of one of the finest child actors the movies could ever imagine.

A very poor family lives in a tenement building in the slums of New York.  Dad (Arthur Kennedy) works nights, Mom (Barbara Hale) stays at home and 9-year old Tommy (Bobby Driscoll) likes to tell whoppers, some of which are quite imaginative.  He regales his little friends with tales of moving west to a ranch which he says will occur in a couple of days.  And when the landlord hears of their move and comes knocking on the door with some prospective new tenants, Tommy's parents are clearly worn out from dealing with the lies.

One hot and sticky night Tommy asks if he can sleep out on the fire escape.  Mom is agreeable but warns him to be careful.  Not being able to sleep outside of his own apartment because of the heat, he grabs his pillow and ascends one more floor where he sees that it's windier.  

After awhile Tommy hears loud voices in the apartment by which he has encamped and as he peers through a mostly-covered window he sees a couple (Ruth Roman and Paul Stewart) murder a drunken sailor.  Petrified, he hightails it back to his apartment, awakens his mother and tells her what he's seen.  Of course she doesn't believe him and after she tells the father, he informs there may be some corporal punishment if the untrue stories don't stop.

When they send Tommy to his room for the night he sneaks out the window and heads for the police station where, of course, they, more or less, slough it off as typical kid nonsense but agree to put in a visit to the couple's apartment without Tommy.  The cop doesn't mention Tommy to the couple but their suspicions are raised anyway that the cops may be on to something.

The panic level escalates when Tommy's mother hauls him upstairs to apologize to the nice neighbors.  When he won't obey her, Hale tells Roman in front of him that he been saying not very nice things about them.  Roman and Stewart realize the kid knows something and they decide to wait until the kid is alone and then grab him and get the answers they want.

And that comes in an exciting sequence that takes us to the end of the film.  The couple confronts Tommy in his apartment but the boy gets away and runs to a multi-story, empty and dilapidated building next door and for a heart-thumping cat and mouse chase that ends well for the boy.  Reunited with the worried parents who express their sorrow for not believing him, Tommy, of course, promises to tell the truth.

This taut little thriller is based on a story by Cornell Woolrich called The Boy Cried Murder.  He seemed to have a flare for putting ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.  For my money, putting a child in peril adds another layer to the suspense.  Five years later, another Woolrich work involving window-peeking arrived in theaters with Hitchcock's name attached to it, Rear Window.

The job of the screenplay was turned over to Max Dinelli, who knew his way around noirs very well.  Proof of that can be found in The Spiral Staircase, The Reckless Moment, House by the River, Cause for Alarm, Beware My Lovely and Jeopardy.

The direction is handled expertly by a man who didn't do a lot of it, Ted Tetzlaff.  The Window is surely the best film he ever directed.  For years he was an in-demand cinematographer. His last job in that capacity was for Hitchcock's sleek, black and white noir, Notorious (1946).  Though The Window's cinematography is handled by two others, Robert De Grasse and William Steiner, Tetzlaff's influence in unmistakable.  The noir look is much in evidence.

Sleek, however, is not part of the laudatory process here.  The slums of New York, no playgrounds, overworked and overwrought parents not doing their best jobs, young children largely unsupervised and with nothing to do, the struggle, the poverty, the lack of promise, the humidity, sweaty bodies, long faces, short tempers... it's all here to add to the darkness of a murder and a child being stalked.  

Arthur Kennedy & Barbara Hale

I always get squirmy when the mother grabs her young son and takes him to the murderers' apartment for him to admit that he's been spreading lies about them being murderers.  One is thankful the boy doesn't blurt out what he knows but we know the damage has been done.  Of course her action has everything to do with what follows.

I never faulted the writing.  I never said oh what mother would do that?  I thought it was good writing and the issue might have been what thinking mother, but she wasn't thinking or she was thinking more of the neighbor than her son.  She didn't know she was putting him in harm's way.  Again, she is overwrought... no one in that hot, sticky, desperate, miserable environment was doing good thinking.  Don't get me started on allowing one's 9-year old son to sleep on a fire escape several stories high. 

I could neither applaud nor criticize the acting of any of the adults.  The four of them did the job that was required.  Kennedy and Roman have always been actors I liked to watch and Stewart was a hard-looking man whose characters, whether good guys or bad guys, were almost always broken.  

Ruth Roman & Paul Stewart

The thing is The Window is about young Bobby Driscoll, through and through.  I mean, is there anyone else in this movie?  In some interplanetary way this kid was a genius at conveying emotions in his acting.  I can think of adult actors who weren't this good.  His facial expressions just knocked me out.  I'm sure I've seen every one of his films (not a particularly easy thing to accomplish) and I cannot imagine a more gifted or natural child actor.

Driscoll was under contract to Walt Disney.  I believe he was the first performer who was.  Later on Uncle Walt didn't lend out his kid actors but Bobby was an exception.  Had Disney not allowed it, we would never have had the privilege of seeing this performance.  

A little more back story comes by way of Howard Hughes who owned RKO for awhile.  The Window was actually made in 1946 and post-production completed in 1947.  Then Hughes bought RKO and he didn't see The Window as a moneymaker and he didn't like stories about children so he shelved it.  He may also have known that kids rarely figured in noirs.   Then the studio took a financial dive and his various producers begged Hughes to release the film which he did in 1949.

The Window became the sleeper hit of the year.  And Hughes must have eaten some crow when Driscoll was awarded an honorary Oscar for the outstanding juvenile acting of 1949.

Of course some of you know that in 1969 at age 31, the lifeless body of Bobby Driscoll was found on the floor of an abandoned New York tenement.  How sad is that?

Here's a trailer:

Next posting:

a 1940s comedy