The Woman In The Window

A middle-aged professor admires a portrait in a gallery window, meets the woman in the flesh, and by morning is standing over a body. Fritz Lang’s 1944 thriller is the hinge between his German Expressionist past (Metropolis, M, the Dr. Mabuse films) and his reign as a Hollywood master of noir. Already an exile who had reinvented himself with Fury and You Only Live Once, Lang here locks Edward G. Robinson — the gangster icon turned trembling bourgeois — into a nightmare of chance, blackmail, and guilt. Joan Bennett is the woman in the painting; Dan Duryea is the smirking extortionist. Shot like a bad dream (deep shadows, wet streets, a clock that won’t stop), it is a founding text of American film noir: fate as a trap sprung by a single glance. Lang would darken the same trio and theme a year later in Scarlet Street.