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The Woman in the Window (1944) on Netflix

Passed19441h 39mCrimeDramaFilm-NoirMysteryThriller

Psychology professor Richard Wanley, his family away, meets Alice Reed while admiring her portrait in a gallery window. Her jealous lover attacks him; Wanley kills the man in self-defense.

  • Netflix3.7/5
  • IMDb7.6/1019,803 votes
  • Rotten Tomatoes83%

Trailer

Plot summary

At a private men's club, Richard Wanley and his friends Dr. Michael Barkstane and District Attorney Frank Lalor pass the evening. Wanley's wife and children are away on vacation, and next door to the club hangs a portrait of a striking woman. One night Wanley lingers in front of it, and the woman herself, Alice Reed, joins him and invites him to her apartment for a drink. Her jealous lover barges in, misreads the visit and attacks him; Wanley kills the man in self-defense with a pair of scissors. To protect his reputation, he agrees to help conceal the death, and takes the body out of the city to dispose of it.

Cast

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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Woman in the Window (1944)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

  • SPOILERFritz Lang convinced the studio to discard the film's original tragic ending, arguing that Wanley's suicide would be anti-climactic because the story could not carry three deaths; he made the whole story a dream and had Arthur Loft and Dan Duryea reappear as the hat-check man and the porter.
  • SPOILERFritz Lang said the hardest shot to film was the one where Wanley dies at home but wakes up at his club: the close-up was done in 20 seconds without cutting, and Edward G. Robinson wore a tear-away suit over his original club suit that an assistant hidden under the camera pulled off during the take.
  • Merle Oberon was signed for the female lead in March 1944, but her husband Alexander Korda advised her to stay in the United States, she returned to England instead, and Joan Bennett replaced her; Bennett also took over Oberon's role in Nob Hill.
  • Dan Duryea won the blackmailer part in The Woman in the Window after Fritz Lang convinced the studio to cast him, since all the male roles were written for "old men" and Lang wanted someone youthful; Duryea had appeared in Lang's Ministry of Fear.
  • The Woman in the Window played a part in the origin of the term "film noir" itself: the term originated as a genre description in part because of the film.

Stills

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