-Devdutt Trivedi
The Woman in the Window(1944) is Fritz Lang’s masterful middle-class crime noir which gave Lang a ‘second renaissance’ in Hollywood. The film served this function alongside the films he made before and after it, Man Hunt (1941) and Scarlet Street (1945).A loose adaptation literary adaptation of James Harold Wallis’ novel, Once Off Guard (1942), the film continues Lang’s adaptation of pulp fiction being made at the same time, much like his earlier film Man Hunt (1941), which was an adaptation of Geoffrey Household’s novel, Rouge Male (1939) and his subsequent genre work Scarlet Street, a remake of Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1932), based on Georges de La Fouchardière French novel.
The Woman in The Window and Scarlet Street form an important diptych with their repetition of cast members, mainly Edward G. Robinson as the paranoid middle-class criminal, Joan Bennett playing the trademark noir ‘femme fatale,’ and Dan Duryea playing the archetypal role of ‘(the) man who monitors and blackmails the other characters.’ Both films have gone on to become landmark film noirs with critics and audiences alike disagreeing on which of the two is superior.
Lang’s film follows the coding of the inverted detective story, a genre of crime fiction developed by R. Austin Freedman. Freedman was a short story writer whose masterpiece, a story titled The Singing Bone was written in 1910. Freedman’s stories usually emphasized the importance of clues in tracing down the identity of the murderer. Lang also borrows from Freedman’s style, acute technical points around the violent act, such as the problems faced following the crime-event such as the disposing of the body as well as the possibility of him/her being vulnerable to blackmail. Another characteristic of Freedman’s stories is his use of country settings, usually used for disposing of the body which Lang borrows from and utilizes effectively in Woman in the Window.
The film functions within the domain of the action-image, where fragments of action create a background psychological process, which creates the basis for the characters’ actions. Lang was instrumental in creating his form of action-image based on the notion of an ‘underlying dynamism’. This dominates the underlying presence of stretched/compressed time known as time-image, as opposed to the Russian formalists Eisenstein and Pudovkin and their use of montage to create opposition, conflict and eventually ‘dialectical materialism.’ Gilles Deleuze points out the characteristics of Lang’s action-image pointing out that its parts (fragments) consist of ‘organized action(s), segmented in space and in time’
The action is centered on one event in the film that will create the psychological basis for the character’s subsequent actions. The character will be forced to commit this act by accident such that a psychological study of the particular action’s motives will not be possible. According to Deleuze, with reference to Lang’s masterwork M (which Deleuze claims ‘prepared Lang’s departure for America’), this action creates ‘a negative place’ for the psychological processes that the character will be forced to undergo much before the
character actually knows that she/he is to occupy it. To add to this point, one must note that Lang engages with the ‘progressive unmasking of the murderer’ through the discourse of the nature of the ‘true’ and ‘false’.
The ‘true’ and the ‘false’ are mediated with a discourse of materiality where facts become materials that may or may not be suspended across the whole of the film. This pervades the Wellesian ‘virtual-image ‘of either the dream or the hallucination. Lang borrows Welles’ approach to the nature of the ‘false’ as is the case with the unknown object ‘Rosebud’ in Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane, but adapts it to a (true) psychological basis of action, instead of, as in Welles case, a false psychological basis of action that instead presents a (true) memory image based on reflection and not action. The materiality is defined by the presence or absence of matter in the form of actual materials which transform themselves into evidence which will utilized in the future (as opposed to the perceived present) to corner the alleged murderer. Lang presents a material discourse around the process of collecting evidence: the objects which Wanley (Robinson) and Reed (Bennett) exchange, the money given to Duryea’s character, the newspaper with Robinson’s photo on it, which complement the ‘actual’ clues: the body, the tire tracks (which are present) and the woman who will tie up the clues (which is never really completely played out and is therefore representative of absence).
Critics, although unanimous in their acceptance of the film’s importance, even greatness, have often pointed out the cop out ending that was in line with the requirements of the Production Code. However Gene D. Philips in his analysis of the film finds the ending ‘perfectly plausible’ and disagrees with contemporary critic Tony Thomas who found the film’s ending ‘something of a letdown.’ Philips ‘sides with’ John McCarty who in his critique of the film comments on the ending of the film that according to him reveals ‘that Lang's choice of ending is . . . appropriate to the material’
When asked to respond to the cheat ending of the film Lang stated:
“I personally felt that an audience wouldn't think a movie worthwhile in which a man kills another man and then kills himself just because he had made the mistake of going home with a girl. That's when I thought of having him wake up to discover that he had fallen asleep in an armchair at his club. So I was able to end the story on a positive note, rather than just having it wind up as a movie with a killing and a suicide in it.”
Lang also suggested that the reason for the film’s ‘considerable success’ was the ending and that ‘with another ending its success would have been less.’
The film’s ‘cheat ending’ is also in line with the conservative film practice that the studio system forced on the film which almost always undid the radical content of the material it consisted of. This approach can be traced back to the silent Expressionist masterworks by Lang and his contemporaries in Germany, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Robert Wiene and Paul Wegener. The film evokes the radical content of Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) in its reflection of the possessed mass (except in the case of Caligari where it was specific to the German mass at the end of the First World War) and in its film form that reflected the ‘soul at work’ in opposition to Futurism’s dictum of ‘men at work.’ The film’s radical message is subverted so that it
caters to those in power so that the representation of a political reality is subverted by concluding it with the fantasy ‘cheap ending.’
This ‘cheap ending’ which claimed that the narrative formation was a lunatic’s hallucination, was a way by which the political content of the film was made irrelevant. The film’s material became what the French Young Turks, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, would have called ‘bourgeoisie’; i.e. film content free from commentary outside of the form that traps its content. The relevance of the film is therefore suspended by transforming the reality of its discourse into a fantasy, a rather politically motivated devise often replicated in film noirs to suggest the conservative attitude of the state. In Hollywood, the political relevance of a film, often brought out through discourse against the State, coded homosexuality and violence; is superseded by tension created by the narrative which grips the viewer making ‘film craft’ seem empty of relevance. With Lang’s work, the flow of images is so violent and revolutionary that the content is often manipulated in chunks so that the revolutionary fragment or the shot (as in Eisenstein’s conception) is repressed for the middle-class fantasy that the mise-en-scene conforms to.
Lang would follow The Woman in the Window with Scarlet Street, with the same cast. The subsequent noir is a remake of Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931) and would go on to becoming amongst the greatest remakes in film history.
References:
Exiles in Hollywood: Major European Film Directors in America by Gene D. Philps, Associated University Presses Inc., 1998