THE WINDOW

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 537, 7 October 1949, Page 24

THE WINDOW

(RKO-Radio) SAW two films last week, either of which would have been enough to leave me in a reasonably contented frame of mind. One, Johnny Belinda, arrived to the accompaniment of the trumpetblasts inevitably associated with films which have been marked out for approval by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The other, The Window, slipped into Wellington and out again almost unnoticed. If I seem to favour the latter, therefore, it is because I think its virtues deserve emphasis, and not just because of ingrained cussedness and perversity. Both are good films. ) I felt favourably disposed towards The Window as soon as I saw there were no stars in the cast-unless one includes the juvenile Bobby Driscoll in that category. When directors or producers disappoint us, the fault (I have often felt) is not in themselves so much as in their stars-or at least in the star system. Give a good producer the freedom to control a group of halfanonymous but competent players, give him a good script, and a good film should follow as inevitably as a Euclidian corollary. And The Window has a good script, and a good producer in Dore Scharyand the finished production is the neatest piece of small-scale drama which I have seen since Pitfall (Listener, 4:2.49). The purist might complain that occasionally it is a little too neat, that the texture is in places too closely woven and the tension maintained more than once by ignoring the laws of probability. But the tension is maintained most effectively, and that is the acid test of the film’s quality. In every department the work done is above average. I can’t remember offhand when last I was so pleased with the acting of an American juvenile as I was with Bobby Driscoll’s portrayal of the imaginative small boy whose penchant for telling tall stories nearly costs him his life. Barbara Hale and Arthur Kennedy-both unknown to me -were unusually well cast as the boy’s working-class parents. The strong atmosphere of naturalism, in fact, was perhaps the most notable general characteristic of the film. The settings were authentic (New York in situ), and the players looked. spoke, and moved like real people. Even the villains of the piece emerged as believable human beings whose behaviour one could understand, and with whose frantic terror one could even sympathise. The Window is not a long film (in Hollywood, where they measure length rather than depth, they would call it a B Grade production), but it is just long enough. Nine out of ten films could with advantage be cut down to 7,000 feet and few cash customers (least of all those who now pack the last trams home) would complain about it. —