Post by Capo on Jul 7, 2008 15:24:28 GMT
The Woman in the Window
Fritz Lang 1944 | USA
While his family go on holiday, a well-to-do family man meets the girl of his dreams, and, when he kills her lover in self-defence, finds himself in increasing danger of getting caught.
Lang's cautionary noir takes as its framing device an infuriating and probably unforgivable dream narrative; but with reflection, the subtle notion of cynicism - not lazy optimism - prevails. Edward G. Robinson shines as our likeable protagonist, a college professor who, with friends, fantasises over a portrait of a woman in the shop window next door to the gentlemen's club they frequent. Looks are deceiving, in both the smaller details (the portrait itself shows innocence, while the woman in it is an unwitting femme fatale) and the bigger (this is not quite the fairytale "what-if?" it seems). The irony lies in the ending: scared shitless by the nightmare he's just had, Robinson runs back to the happy family life waiting for him; that is, the banal, bourgeois situation that begged such dark fantasies to run wild in him in the first place. And so the film becomes not only an interesting, fatalistic account of one's man fall into despair (or, meeting an inevitable fate by a moment of luckless chance), but also a critique of the modern, repressed values of capitalist America.
Fritz Lang 1944 | USA
While his family go on holiday, a well-to-do family man meets the girl of his dreams, and, when he kills her lover in self-defence, finds himself in increasing danger of getting caught.
Lang's cautionary noir takes as its framing device an infuriating and probably unforgivable dream narrative; but with reflection, the subtle notion of cynicism - not lazy optimism - prevails. Edward G. Robinson shines as our likeable protagonist, a college professor who, with friends, fantasises over a portrait of a woman in the shop window next door to the gentlemen's club they frequent. Looks are deceiving, in both the smaller details (the portrait itself shows innocence, while the woman in it is an unwitting femme fatale) and the bigger (this is not quite the fairytale "what-if?" it seems). The irony lies in the ending: scared shitless by the nightmare he's just had, Robinson runs back to the happy family life waiting for him; that is, the banal, bourgeois situation that begged such dark fantasies to run wild in him in the first place. And so the film becomes not only an interesting, fatalistic account of one's man fall into despair (or, meeting an inevitable fate by a moment of luckless chance), but also a critique of the modern, repressed values of capitalist America.