Rex Butler
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Rex Butler |
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Introduction
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Fritz Lang has always been one of my favourite directors. As with Hitchcock, his 'telegraphic clarity of narrative technique' (Tom Gunning) lends his films an abstract, almost diagrammatic quality, something of the sense of inevitability of all great art. Interesting, then, that so many of his films deal with the chaos and disorder running beneath the surface order of things. Perhaps the purest example of this is The Woman in the Window, the first of the trilogy starring Joan Bennett and truly the complement to It’s a Wonderful Life, made around the same time in 1946. A noirish mise en abyme tale, The Woman in the Window features several moments of brilliant, caustic humour: the famous shot at the end of the film when Edward G. Robinson, playing Professor of Criminal Psychology Richard Wanley, gets his clothes re-arranged around him while he is framed in extreme close-up; his friend District Attorney Frank Lalor inadvertently characterising him as of 'moderate circumstances' while describing the hypothetical killer (I can identify with that!); and the wonderful conceit of a beautiful woman asking a homely middle-aged man to go upstairs and see her etchings (ditto!). In a film about the virtual fantasy world and the unleashed Id, what more fitting than this shot of the delectable Joan Bennett as femme fatale with – of all things – a nude female torso reflected in a mirror behind her? |
