The Window (1949)

May 17, 1949 (premiere), August 6, 1949, general U.S. release date

Directed by Ted Tetzlaff

Screenplay by Mel Dinelli

Based on a story “The Boy Cried Murder” by Cornell Woolrich

Music by Roy Webb

Edited by Frederic Knudtson

Cinematography by Robert De Grasse, William O. Steiner

Bobby Driscoll as Tommy Woodry

Barbara Hale as Mrs. Mary Woodry

Arthur Kennedy as Mr. Ed Woodry

Paul Stewart as Mr. Joe Kelerson

Ruth Roman as Mrs. Jean Kelerson

Anthony Ross as Detective Ross

Richard Benedict as murdered seaman

Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures

 The Window premiered sixty-seven years ago this month, and the film can still bring viewers to the edge of their seats. The opening sequence shows a city street crowded with tenements, then cuts to Tommy Woodry, the main character, playing in an abandoned building. But it’s not clear at first that he is playing; he might really be hurt instead. When Tommy reaches for the gun that he finds on the floor, I assumed he found a real one. But then he starts calling out to his friends, and the tone of the movie lightens up a little bit—for a little while.

It’s not long before Tommy sees the Kelersons, his neighbors in the apartment upstairs, kill a man they were trying to rob. He witnesses the crime through an open window, from his perch on the fire escape, where he tried to find some relief from the summer heat and get a good night’s sleep. No one believes him when he describes what he witnessed because he’s capable of telling such tall tales. The film makes this clear: He has already told an unbelievable story about shooting someone to his parents at the dinner table. The landlord thinks his family is moving out because he told his friends that he is moving to a ranch that his father owns—somewhere near Tombstone, which he thinks is in Texas.

(This blog post about The Window contains spoilers.)

The on-location scenes place the viewer right in Tommy’s urban neighborhood. The chase later in the film through the abandoned tenement building is especially suspenseful. At one point, the wooden stairs crash, leaving Mr. Kelerson hanging—literally. That shot must have been spectacular in a movie theater with a big screen: The point of view is from under the stairs and the pieces come crashing down from overhead.

And Tommy is under threat—during the chase scene and throughout the film. Mr. Kelerson knocks him unconscious in a cab. He tries to fake an accident for Tommy by placing him on a fire escape railing and leaving him there to fall five stories to his death. Placing a child character in this type of situation, in this amount of danger, is very different from most noirs that I’ve seen so far. I assumed that Tommy would survive all these near-misses because he’s only a child, but the film builds so much tension that I wasn’t sure I could take anything for granted.

I noticed that some of Tommy’s problems don’t come necessarily from the tall tales he tells. Adults are more likely to believe adults than children, it seems to me, and Tommy is no exception in this script. Tommy goes to the police station to report the murder that he witnessed. One of the police detectives escorts him home. That detective believes Tommy’s mother and not Tommy about the Kelersons, although the detective does go up to the Kelersons’ apartment just to be on the safe side. He poses as a repair estimator and snoops around—so adults are capable of telling tall tales, too. Later in the film, when the Kelersons have caught Tommy and are taking him back to their own apartment in a cab, Tommy calls out the window to a patrol officer, who doesn’t believe Tommy when he shouts for help and says that the Kelersons aren’t his parents.

The ending, when the parents finally believe that Tommy was telling the truth all along, seemed a bit saccharine to me, but after all that poor kid went through (knocked unconscious, perched on a fire escape railing five stories up in a staged accident, almost falling from a loose beam), I felt like the film—and I—needed a happy ending. Until the ending, The Window builds on one suspenseful scene after another.