Movie Details
| Title: | The Window | |
| Director: | Ted Tetzlaff | |
| Year: | 1949 | |
| Genre: | Noir | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 06.04.07 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 06.04.07 | Alamo Downtown | Noir night at the Alamo with czar of noir Eddie Muller there to introduce the movie and talk about his whole preservation thing that he's doing and be generally interesting. I am super psyched to hear that he's found elements for Joe Losey's The Prowler and that a new print will be struck this year... been looking to see that movie for like ten years. But tonight he was here with this movie which I'd never heard of (although apparently AFS played it a long time ago, along with all the other interesting movies I wanted to see that they never show anymore) but still, it's relatively unheard of and in a new print that looked gorgeous. The story is a version of Aesop's boy who cried wolf with a kid in NYC who sees a murder from a fire escape one night. This movie has some awesome little-kid-in-peril stuff going on and the parents come off as awesomely neglectful nowadays. I just loved them... at one point the dad gets fed up with the kid's tall tales and says to him "you don't want to ake me ashamed of you do you? well pretty soon, you'll be known as a liar and people will see me on the street and say 'there's the father of that liar'" (paraphrased). so cruel! Not to mention the villains of the movie who, once they find out he was witness to their unexplained murder (maybe killing someone in your own home is a bad idea?), try to shut him up. The movie climaxes in an old condemned tenemet building with some really great suspense. Actually the whole movie is expert with its tension and how this poor kid is not only not taken seriously but actively pushed toward exposing himself to the killers. And there's a scene where the boy's trying to push a key out of a lock and the killer's on the other side of the door helping him to get the key. Sound familiar? For like a year now I've been defending that movie Torso because of one amazing scene and here I see it, done like 25 years before, almost exactly the same. Screw you, Torso! After the movie, I got Muller to autograph my copy of Dark City and ended up talking with him for a good five or ten minutes. It was awesome. I don't know about everyone else but this was something I was really looking forward to and completely delivered on my expectations. I thought the movie was fantastic, Muller was a great guest and a really nice guy, and although it wasn't packed I wasn't alone either. I really wish they'd get him back to do a whole series of obscure noirs... co-sponsor with AFS and call it like Lost Noir Weekend or something and get Muller and James Ellroy down to host. Looking at Muller's San Francisco fest looks amazing... too bad I can't afford to visit San Francisco for 10 days so he has to do it here instead. |
