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When I told a friend I was planning to revisit Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window at the Siskel Center this past Saturday, he made a joke about the movie’s corny twist ending, which reveals the preceding narrative to have been dreamt by the main character, a middle-aged professor played by Edward G. Robinson. It’s the sort of conclusion that feels tacked on, leading spectators to wonder if the filmmakers didn’t know how else to end the story. I don’t know if the makers of Woman in the Window actually suffered this problem, but ultimately that’s a moot point—a great movie remains that way no matter how it ends, Michael Miner be damned. And so, I decided on Saturday to watch the movie in a generous state of mind (after all, Fritz Lang’s films have given me so much), assuming that the twist ending was intentional and the movie is supposed to be Robinson’s nightmare. Would the movie play differently if I viewed it not as a conventional thriller, but as the representation of a troubled subconscious?
It’s such a pure scenario in its pattern of desire, temptation, transgression, and guilt, and Lang emphasizes its elemental quality with stripped-down mise-en-scene. The movie doesn’t feel cheap, but deliberately bare—we don’t even know in which city the story takes place! With so little around them, the objects that arouse Robinson’s guilt seem especially significant, like those items in dreams that we manage to remember after waking. I could continue to consider how The Woman in the Window feels “dreamlike,” but I’m interested in what the movie tells us about the dreamer, one of those pathetic little people with an advanced sense of integrity who is often the heart of Fritz Lang’s films.
