A middle aged professor (Edward G. Robinson) runs into a beautiful call girl (Joan Bennett) while admiring her portrait and they go back to her apartment. A jealous client bursts in and attacks the professor and they kill him in self defense. Fearful of their reputations, and that they won’t be believed, they decide to hide the body. The client turns out to have been an important man so the police dive in—with the professor getting a play-by-play of the hunt for himself over drinks with his good friend, the District Attorney (Raymond Massey). Things get worse when a blackmailer shows up (Dan Duryea).
It’s an old truism that films come in twos (notice animated bug movies and Hercules movies in a single year), so why not just go for it? So in 1944 and 1945 director Fritz Lang and actors Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea made a pair of Film Noirs about a middle-aged man happening upon a beautiful prostitute that leads to murder. The second was Scarlett Street and this is the first.
The Woman in the Window starts as the better of the two. Both the professor and the call girl (it’s never specified that is her job due to the censors, but it is obvious) are likable and understandable, so when they are tense, so is the viewer. I wanted them to escape. And this is a brighter Noir world than Scarlett Street, so it seems almost as if they could. Everyone isn’t petty or evil. Both our leads are nice enough, the professor’s vacationing wife is loving, his friends are pleasant, and the police seem reasonable. Only the dead man and the blackmailer are evil. So the world isn’t bad and corruption isn’t inevitable; the pair is just stuck in a bad situation with no good way out.
There are a few minor failing along the way. Our professor makes a few too many stupid slips—not the sort one would expect from nerves, but more the sort you find with a screenwriter trying to be cute. He keeps saying things to the district attorney about the murder before he’s been told (that the missing person was murdered, that there was barbed wire at the scene, that the body was dumped at night). And I’m skeptical about multiple things dealing with the murder scene, but that’s all easy to overlook.
The Girl in the Corner is a superior Noir for 132 minutes, and then it all falls apart in the last 7. This is damns bursting and bridges collapsing kind of falling apart. First we have a ridiculous coincidence that would be enough to take a star away from its rating, but that’s before something far, far worse. I’ll leave you to discover it if you are so inclined and only say that it is the worst possible ending they could have tacked on—Superman swooping in to save the day, everyone breaking into a song and dance, or the professor revealing himself to be a mob boss in hiding and machine-gunning everyone would all have been preferable. So choose one of those and stop the film early.