A respectable psychology professor Richard Wanley (Robinson) sees off his wife and two kids at the train station, they are off on vacation, but as the breadwinner of the household, his teaching job excludes him from that familial bliss. Always a telling sign, when a married man is temporarily shorn of his marital trappings, which leaves a fertile ground for fancies.
Later, he is enthralled to see an oil painting of a strikingly beauteous young woman hanging in the storefront next to the men’s club where he patronizes, and is instantly bewitched. Tantalized to envision what will happen if he meets the woman in real life, Fritz Lang and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson take it on themselves to fantasize a middle-age, straight-arrow family man’s worst nightmare which consists of a self-defensive killing and its ensuing cover-up, followed by the resultant police investigation and grubby blackmail, in the end of the day, when tragedy seems to be inevitable, a sting in the tail is suffixed to placate the Hays code.
But in hindsight, Lang leaves many iffy hints hither and thither, which actually cushion the final reveal. For example, it looks unreal for a dumpy Richard to schlep the dead weight of a hefty man around as if it is duck soup, and in one the film’s most memorable scenes, Lang’s expressionist urge grants us a glimpse of the dead man, whose eyes are wide open in sharp chiaroscuro; more evidently, even by the standard of Hollywood artistic license, the identities of the two fellow club members whom Richard fraternizes with, are far too convenient designated only for the sake of plot development.
One is a doctor (Breon) who can offhand prescribe heart-stopping medicine to Richard and the other is the D.A. Frank Lalor (Massey), who is not only more than willingly to enthuse about the supposedly confidential particulars of the said case, which of course, happens to fall under his jurisdiction, and to jump the shark, he even insists on bringing Richard to the scene where the corpse is disposed, what is more unbelievable, Richard doesn’t bother to refuse the invitation, all is to make for the suspenseful yet engaging scenario of “unwitting detectives with a culprit ridden by guilty conscience”, where Richard inadvertently betrays much more information than an innocent onlooker should know of, to great cinematic effect too, Robinson is mostly competent when he is losing his grip.
However, that is only the half of the story, and Frank completely disappears thereafter in the narrative, which means suspicion has never linked to Richard. The sticking point lays in the other half, Alice Reed (Bennett), the woman in the window, a kept woman of the dead and Richard’s accomplice in the cover-up, who is blackmailed by Heidt (Duryea), an immoral kind. Richard has no qualms about suggesting to do away with him as he is very aware that a blackmailer’s appetite is never satiable, the problem is, just as he later comments when their murderous plan falls through, “they are not very good at it.”. During the two-hander between Alice and Heidt, Lang lays bare how vulnerable and helpless a woman’s privacy can be easily trespassed upon by a vicious male intruder once she opens her door, Duryea is very skillful in his showboating of menace and glibness, whereas Bennett holds her own with Alice’s equally suspect moral sense, at one point, we are nearly roped into believing the two are going to take flight together, because deep down, a voice keeps reminding us that Alice is a typical femme fatale (a gnawing feeling also honed by Arthur Lange’s Oscar nominated rhapsodic score), oh boy, that is really wide of the mark.
What alleviates the feeling of being cheated by Lang’s deus ex machina, is the part right before it, when their doom is unexpectedly and ideally resolved, only Richard cannot be apprised of the good tidings, pointedly, it is this cruel irony that would be too bleak for some to stomach, offsets the adversity of a castles-in-the-air last-minute revelation, although the film’s impact is abated from a scathing opprobrium to a whimsical cautionary tale bearing on a man’s irrepressible urge of his Freudian desire, one cannot say Lang’s moderation de rigueur is an interior move, since most people prefer the soft sell, it might indeed, conduce to the reputation of this arresting film noir.
referential entries: Lang’s CLOAK AND DAGGER (1946, 6.5/10); William Dieterle's PORTRAIT OF JENNIE (1948, 6.7/10).
