On the first Friday of every month, this column by critic Joshua Polanski will feature a short review or essay on a film directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976), the great Austrian “Master of Darkness.” Occasionally (but not too occasionally), Fritz on Fridays will also feature interviews and conversations with relevant critics, scholars and filmmakers about Lang’s influence and filmography. 

One of Fritz Lang’s rare financially successful Hollywood films, The Woman in the Window might be the most important film the director made after leaving the German industry. The Austrian émigré formed his own production company to make the film oft considered to have contributed to the origins of the film noir (somewhat ironically, considering the main female character is hardly a femme fatale) and, according to Paste Magazine, with this film, he made the greatest noir in cinema history. The other film he made the same year? Ministry of Fear, one of the boldest anti-fascist statements to ever come out of a Hollywood picture. As disaster ravaged Lang’s homeland, 1944 was a good year for his artistic career.

Psychology professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) opens The Woman in the Window with a lecture intended for no one in the room (we never meet a student of his) but only the audience: The professor instructs that the biblical commandment “thou shalt not kill” needs to be qualified in the face of modern legal standards associated with homicide. As quickly as he remarks about self-defense and the various degrees of murder, Lang and editor Marjorie (Johnson) Fowler cut the lecture mid-sentence. The twist ending questions this lecture with the emotional reckoning of actually taking the life of another. Regardless of legal distinctions or moral outs, taking a life can ruin your own.

The life taken is an occasional lover of Alice Reed (played by the wondrous Joan Bennett). The lover, Frank Lalor (Raymond Massey), walks in on Wanley and Reed having a chaste evening in her home and attacks the professor. The much younger and more alluring (almost dreamy) Reed hands a pair of scissors to her new friend to defend himself. Realizing how legally compromised their situation would appear, the two cover up their crime rather than going to the authorities. (If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is basically the story of Lang’s alleged murder of his first wife that I summarized in my review of The Big Heat).

Critics have always been harsh on the twist ending, calling it a “cop-out” or worse. Most often, it’s seen as an indicator of Hollywood interference — though this argument lacks merit since the Motion Picture Production Code’s restrictions began to lighten in the 1940s and Lang himself stated it was his idea (the ending in his adaptation differs from that of Once Off Guard, the J.H. Wallis novel on which it’s based). Most importantly, the ending, which I will refrain from spoiling, is the truest expression of the story told before its conclusion. The meticulous timing, imaginative coincidences and too-perfect structure can only lead to one finale. During the same interview in which Lang mentioned The Woman in the Window as one of his favorites, he described his films as “the struggle of the individual against fate.” The “cop-out” ending, in this context, acknowledges the social structures that create fate by denying them. The same social structures our character escapes from, and the manner in which he escapes them, remind us of our own determinedness.

A large portion of the film takes place within one or two domestic spaces — a space in which Wanley, as a man, has more freedom than Reed does to enter and exit as he pleases. The world is nearly dreamlike. The night is ephemeral, the costumes and apartment both picturesque. Reed, a homebody from what we see, dresses ornately and dazzling even though she rarely leaves the home. Why does she dress as if she’s always got a hot date? She’s a beautiful woman, perfectly matched in perceived submissiveness and fierceness, to attract the standard (misogynist) suit-and-tie man of the mid-20th century. Played by the Queen of Noir herself, even Reed herself continues with the dreamy qualities by carrying the energy of a sexualized masculine dream. (After all, she was written by Wallis and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, both men, in a film directed by another man.)

The collective body of cinephilia has never doubted Lang as a master of craft and suspense. But he’s underappreciated as a humorous pop filmmaker, and The Woman in the Window is a prime example. Including its twist ending, the film is structured almost like a chiasm around Wanley reading the Bible’s Song of Solomon as erotica. This sort of serious irreverence playfully spits in the face of Hollywood censorship (and may or may not have affected the twist ending). 

In what I think is the film’s funniest moment, the Boy Scout who finds the body of the victim deadpans straight to the camera with full sincerity: “I was practicing woodcraft in the woods just off the Bronx River Parkway extension when I found Mr. … Mr. Mazard’s remains. No, I was not scared. A Boy Scout is never scared. If I get the reward, I will send my younger brother to some good college and I will go to Harvard.” As a filmmaker obsessed with guilt, consequences and the influence of capital, Lang locates humor, via gleeful ignorance, in the same place as his drama and thrills — the social structures that define an unsavory and sinful adult life, the weapons of the power that turn us into agents of fate.

Joshua Polanski is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, In Review Online, and Off Screen amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, and East Asian & Middle Eastern film. He is currently based in Akron, Ohio.