The Window

Possibly the only noir in which a child is silenced by a knockout punch to the head, Ted Tetzlaff’s The Window is a “boy who cried wolf” tale in which his latest wolf, which goes ignored, is the murder of a sailor by his upstairs neighbors. The over-imaginative Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll) sleeps out on the fire escape of his grimy tenement building one sweltering summer night but awakens to witness his neighbors Joe (Paul Stewart) and Jean Kellerman (Ruth Roman) stabbing a young sailor to death with a pair of scissors. When his parents (Arthur Kennedy, Barbara Hale) discipline him for making up stories, he reports the incident to the police, who don’t believe him either. In an effort to teach him a lesson, Mrs. Driscoll marches him upstairs to apologize to the Kellermans for making up lies; by revealing what he saw, however, his own mother signs his death warrant. Tetzlaff creates effective suspense throughout; note the scene when Tommy is home alone at night, locked in his bedroom by his father, and the flashlight appears outside the window, floating across the walls like a deadly search light. The Woodrys’ apartment building is painted with nasty shadows and grime; the abandoned building next door, where Bobby plays with his friends, reminds us, perhaps intentionally, of the war rubble present in so many European noirs. The climax in the abandoned building is a tense action sequence that, aside from Tommy’s omnipresent striped jersey, feels unusually modern.