A Film Canon

The first of Lang's great dream-noirs, The Woman In The Window extrapolates a narrative from the window display that fascinates psychology professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) - and, more specifically, from its subordination of the ostensible point of focus - an oil painting of a beautiful woman - to the uncanny emptiness surrounding it, which manages to be both ethereal and oppressive, light and dark, as if air were imbued with the opacity of glass. Appropriately, Wanley's relationship with the object of this portrait (Joan Bennett) is immediately subordinated to their mutual entrapment in just such a medium, due to the unforeseen, traumatic emergence of one of her jaded lovers, and the violent manslaughter that quickly follows. To this end, Lang imbues the action with the same glassiness, from the mirrors that pervade the woman's apartment, to the car windows and windscreens that so often constitute the only thing between Wanley and capture, as well as their common denominator - the rear-vision mirror that equates looking over his shoulder with the mere act of glancing into this medium. The result is the first film to fully transform tension, or suspense, into the more characteristically noir experience of an interminable, unbearable waiting, in which the exponential identification of what is with what might be produces a hallucinatory intensity that, along with this shimmering glassiness, paves the way for what might otherwise be a fairly disappointing, or at least conventional, conclusion.