A modest and brief B-film from the great era of film noir,
The Window is a fine example of a simple morality tale – (in this case
“the boy who cried wolf”) – used to mask a very dark look into urban decay,
family angst, and most importantly, the profound fragility of community and the
notion of neighborliness. Bobby Driscoll,
(specially on loan, as the credits make a fuss of announcing, from Walt
Disney), plays the boy with an active imagination who often embarrasses his
parents with his wild tales. Inevitably,
when he finally tells the truth about something serious, no one believes
him. One night he spies a married couple
in his tenement building killing a man and disposing of his body. When they find out that Bobby has been
telling everyone about it, and being ignored, they realize they have time to
arrange a tragic accident for the boy.
What a pleasure it is to enjoy the genuinely hair-raising climax of a
tight suspense thriller, told simply and making the most of germane locations;
a remarkable contrast to the hokey, compounded twist-endings piled up at the
finales of most contemporary thrillers.
If the basic premise sounds familiar to Hitchcock fans, it’s because the
source material’s author, Cornell Woolrich, also wrote a short story called Rear
Window, from which Hitchcock derived his great masterpiece of 1954.
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