Stupid head cold! It came on me on Tuesday, and so far it has made me miss a haircut, a massage, a night at the theatre, and forty bucks for COVID tests. (Fortunately, I have tested negative – twice!) I hate being sick! I hate NyQuil, and daily bowls of chicken soup, and drowning my sorrows in herbal tea. I . . . am . . . GROUCHY!

So I’m sitting here in my bathrobe, drinking herbal tea and trying to come up with simple grifts to coax a few dollars out of some poor sap. The easiest one that comes to mind is to go up to a poor sucker, hand him a folded piece of paper, and say:

“I’ve written down the name of a movie. It’s based on a story by Cornell Woolrich, it’s set in New York during a heat wave, and it’s about a guy who looks through a window and thinks he sees a murder being committed. Nobody believes him, not the police or his loved ones. And in the end, he nearly gets himself killed. Give me the title I’ve written down here on the first try and you get ten bucks! Get it wrong, and you give me the money!!” 

And then you smile all friendly-like and say: “I’ll even give you a clue: the two-word title of the movie has the word “window” in it.”

Odds are that the mark will blurt out Rear Window, the Hitchcock classic which happens to be my favorite movie of all time. (I’ve written about it here.) He’ll be so confident about his answer that when he opens the paper and finds out he’s wrong, you better grab the money and dash outta there before you end up with a split lip, buddy. 

The actual answer is a nifty little film noir from 1949 called The Window. Based on a hard-to-find short story by Woolrich called “The Boy Cried Murder,” this is no prestige color film with a gorgeous set built on a Hollywood lot. Producer Frederick Ullman wanted it to have a documentary sort of feel, so he sent director Ted Tetzlaff to New York City to film on location. And they hired screenwriter Mel Dinelli, who had scored big with the serial killer mystery The Spiral Staircase in 1946, and cinematographer Robert DeGrasse, whose lengthy career included prestige pictures (Stage Door, Kitty Foyle) and crime dramas – including Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man, a scary adaptation of Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi. 

 

Don’t quote me, but The Window may be the only film noir centered around a child protagonist. For that reason, you might expect the movie to take on a lighter, friendlier tone. Happily, it does no such thing: it takes its young star, Bobby Driscoll, and puts him in unpleasant and dangerous situations. It’s funny to think that the film was completed just as Howard Hughes took over RKO Pictures. He hated the film and its young star and refused to release it. After he was persuaded to change his mind, the film became a critical and financial success. The New York Times praised the young star’s “brilliant” acting as the reason for that success, and Driscoll went on to win a Juvenile Oscar for his work that year. 

And wouldn’t you know? I recorded the movie a few months ago and was saving it for a rainy, head-cold kind of day! 

While Hitchcock took Woolrich’s short story “It Had To Be Murder” and brilliantly expanded it in both cast and scope, The Window keeps things simple, but there are definite similarities between the stories and smartness in the story-telling. Both films open with a wide shot of a New York City neighborhood, but while Hitchcock manufactured his multiple apartment building set on a Hollywood lot, here we see the actual poverty of a teeming Lower East Side tenement in all its squalor. The camera moves into a crumbling building and searches out the body of a small boy crumpled in a corner. He raises himself with effort, reaches out and grasps a dangerous-looking revolver. With great stealth, he crawls across the floor until he is at a ledge several floors above the ground, staring down at a circle of figures who form his prey. He takes aim – and fires! 

Of course, it’s a cap gun, and the “prey” are other neighborhood boys that this one is trying to impress with his bravado. (We all used to have guns like this and play these violent games!) The boy, Tommy Woodry (Driscoll), rushes down the crumbling staircase to explain how his prowess with guns comes from a relative who helped tame the Wild West, but his friends are unimpressed because Tommy is known for his wealth of tall tales. He lives in a tenement with his parents (Barbara Hale and Arthur Kennedy). Life is hard for them: dad works nights at the factory and mom is just scraping by on his salary. Neither has time for Tommy’s fanciful imagination, and they get angry when one story nearly leads to their eviction. The stage is set for a modern version of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” film noir-style.

One night, it’s so hot that, hoping to catch a stray breeze, Tommy decides to sleep on the fire escape of the Kellersons, the couple who live in the apartment above the Woodrys. He is awakened by a disturbance and looks through the window to see the Kellersons murder a man. The filming of this scene takes on the tone of a nightmare, and when in the morning he tells his parents he witnessed a murder, they naturally dismiss it as a nightmare or another one of Tommy’s stories. In fact, they ground him for telling more lies, Tommy decides to sneak out of the house and report the murder to the police. 

One doesn’t have to stretch reality far to create a child’s version of a noir world, where adults never believe kids and their actions tend to make matters worse. The police don’t believe Tommy either, and they bring him back to his mother who then drags the frightened boy upstairs to the Kellersons, tells Mrs. Kellerson what happened and demands that Tommy apologize to her! Della Street would never have done something so stupid, but Mrs. Woodry has sealed her son’s fate! Throughout the film, there’s an interesting contrast between Tommy’s well-intentioned parents, whose frustration with their son hardens them (Barbara Hale threatens her own son with a hairbrush!), and the Kellersons, all smiles and gentle voices as they attempt to lure Tommy into their clutches. I couldn’t help thinking of another highly effective film about a child in peril: 1953’s Invaders from Mars. Although it’s a different genre, Jimmy Hunt has to deal with good and evil parent figures when his mom and dad are transformed into Martian slaves. (And it helps that Hillary Brooke and Lief Ericson, the parents here, had both performed in plenty of crime dramas.)

The film is beautifully shot and scored. De Grasse films key moments from Tommy’s point of view, like the murder and the boy’s confrontation with the killers. Early shots from the condemned building where Tommy and his friends play are mirrored in the climax, when our young hero is repeatedly put in mortal danger. Composer Roy Webb plays sweeping music when Tommy is in motion but allows stark silence to accompany the most tense sequences. 

Kennedy and Hale turn in fine performances as Tommy’s parents, struggling palpably as their son’s imagination tips the scales on their already difficult life. Paul Stewart, of the Mercury Players (he played Raymond, the suave butler, in Citizen Kane) is truly menacing as Mr. Kellerson: he can put on a smooth face when necessary and then burst into violence (there’s a moment in a taxicab with Tommy that is truly shocking). And to play Mrs. Kellerson, RKO cast my least favorite Hitchcock heroine, Ruth Roman, who is so much better here than she would be two years later in Strangers on a Train. 

The Window comes in at a tidy seventy-three minutes, and not a moment of it is wasted. At a quarter of the budget of Rear Window, it remains the lesser film but still manages to instill a sense of fear and menace that Mr. Hitchcock himself would appreciate. 

Now, excuse me . . . I’ve got to go blow my nose.