1944

Films from 1944

The Woman in the Window (1944)

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I’d watch a movie starring Edward G. Robinson any day. He’s one of my favorite actors, always turning in nuanced, mesmerizing performances.

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The Woman in the Window (1944)

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Pair him with director Fritz Lang, and toss in Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, and Dan Duryea, and you can’t go wrong.

That’s the lineup we get in this week’s club pick, The Woman in the Window (the 1944 version).

There’s little of the Expressionist light and shadows of many of Lang’s other films or of other films noir, but he layers on the genre’s moral ambiguity in The Woman in the Window. It’s a solid thriller.

Robinson plays psychology professor Richard Wanley brilliantly. In one day, Wanley goes from sending his wife and kids off to visit family to hiding the body of a man he’s killed in a mysterious woman’s apartment. And, Bennett is alluring as Alice Reed, the unintentional femme fatale.

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Double Indemnity

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Double Indemnity is one of those movies that I’ve seen countless times, and will happily watch again.

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Double Indemnity

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For many of us, Fred MacMurray was the easygoing father, Steve Douglas, in the long-running TV show My Three Sons. In Double Indemnity, he’s the fast-talking, unsmiling insurance salesman Walter Neff, who is easily pulled into a scheme with a woman he’s fallen for, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), to murder her husband for the insurance money.

Visually and plot-wise, Double Indemnity is a film noir, but the dialog is straight out of hard-boiled detective fiction. It makes sense since the script was co-written by Raymond Chandler.

Chandler was one of the “Black Mask Boys,” a group of crime-fiction authors lured by editor Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw to the pulp magazine. Black Mask introduced readers to hard-boiled detective fiction with the short novel “Three Gun Terry,” by Carroll John Daly, in its May 15, 1923, issue. The main character, Terry Mack, was a smart-alecky private detective who talked tough and in the vernacular of the streets, unlike the drawing-room detectives that had been familiar to readers.

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