Watch The Window For Free

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This is a surprisingly suspenseful thriller with a very good cast. The story takes place in a NYC walk up apartment building where a 9 year-old boy, Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll), lives with his mom (Barbara Hale) and dad (Arthur Kennedy). Tommy's dad has to work nights. Since Tommy is always making up stories about himself and others, his parents are concerned about his false story-telling problem. Is this just a phase or should they get some kind of professional help for Tommy? One hot summer night, Tommy asks his mother if he can sleep on the fire escape to cool down while he sleeps. She agrees. However, during the night on the fire escape, Tommy witnesses what he believes to be a murder. He witnesses this though a thin opening in a window shade from the upstairs apartment. When Tommy tells his mother what he witnessed, she tells him that he was just dreaming and should go back to sleep. Concerned, his mother tells his father and he, too, is concerned after questioning Tommy's story. With no one believing his story, Tommy reports it to the police. Fearing that the upstairs neighbors—the Kellersons (Paul Steward and Ruth Roman)--will kill him, Tommy asks the police not to identify him as the person reporting the murder. So, when a police officer goes to the Kellerson's apartment, he poses as a building inspector to check any potential "crime scene" that may be real. He finds nothing that the Kellersons cannot explain and proceeds to assume that Tommy's story was JUST a story. However, the Kellersons now know that they have to get rid of Tommy before he talks too much. To do this, they send a telegram to Tommy's mother to visit her sick sister. This leaves Tommy alone the following night which, in turn, leads to a terrifying cat-and-mouse game between Tommy and the Kellersons.....

"Rear Window" writer Cornell Woolrich's short story "The Boy Cried Murder" served as the basis for director Ted Tetzlaff's suspenseful little thriller "The Window," starring Bobby Driscoll, Arthur Kennedy, Barbara Hale, and Paul Stewart. This RKO Radio Pictures urban crime drama seems like it would be rather risqué for 1949 since an adolescent witnesses a murder. However, nobody will take his claim seriously except the murderers. "The Window" benefited from on location lensing in New York City. Tetzlaff doesn't appear to pull any punches in his depiction of tenement living in the Big Apple. Frederic Knudtson received an Oscar nomination for his editing. "The Spiral Staircase" scenarist Mel Dinelli shared an Edgar award from The Edgar Allan Poe Awards with Woolrich. Furthermore, Dinelli was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for "The Window." Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll of "Treasure Island") is the kind imaginative nine-year old kid who cooks up stories about events that would never occur. He told his playmates one afternoon that his family and he were going to leave their Manhattan apartment and move out west to a ranch after the Indians had been driven off it. The landlord calls on Tommy's father, Ed Woodry (Arthur Kennedy of "Champion"), to show another family the apartment, and Ed had to refute what Tommy said about them leaving. This incident upsets Ed and his wife Mary (Barbara Hale of "The Far Horizons"), and they punish their errant son by confining him to his room. Ed works nights to support his family. Later that evening, Tommy convinces his mother to let him sleep on the fire escape because the weather is so warm. Eventually, Tommy decides to climb the fire escape to the next floor and sleep underneath the window of the couple in the apartment. Struggling to go to sleep, Tommy is awakened when he hears a commotion watches through a gap between the window shade and the window ledge as the Kellersons, Joe (Paul Stewart of "Citizen Kane") and Jean (Ruth Roman of "Strangers on a Train"), steal money from an unconscious man. The drunken sailor (Richard Benedict of "The Shrike") catches them trying to fleece him and fights back. The Kellersons stab him to death with a knife and Tommy watches in horror as the man dies. Tommy scrambles back down to his apartment while the Kellersons take the corpse up onto the roof of the building to dispose of it.Tommy tells his parents about the killing. Naturally, they don't believe him. Desperately, Tommy goes to the local police precinct house and regales the detectives with his tale. A skeptical plainclothes detective escorts Tommy back home and checks up on the Kellersons posing as an interior remodeling agent. The detective cannot find anything amiss. Later, Ed learns from Tommy that he sought out the police. By this time, the Kellersons are puzzled about how Tommy knew about the murder, and Joe decides to question him that evening. As it turns out, Ed is away at work while Mary is taking care of her ailing sister. Joe breaks into the Woodry apartment and corners Tommy. They take him out of the apartment after Ed had told his son to stay put while his mother was away. To ensure that Tommy obeys his father, Ed nails Tommy's window shut. Tommy escapes from the Kellersons, but they manage to recapture him. Nevertheless, Tommy gets away from them again after Joe tried to place him on the fire escape so he would plunge to his death. Jean refuses to see Joe murder Tommy. Joe chases Tommy into a condemned building and during this cat-and-mouse episode, Joe steps on a high beam that collapses and the fall kills him. Tommy starts screaming and the neighbors report the disturbance to the police. Meantime, Ed has gotten off work early and come home to find Tommy missing and the front door ajar. He contacts a patrolman on the beat, and the patrolman believes that Tommy has lighted out to see his mother. The patrolman arranges for Ed to take a radio car to his wife's sister's house. When they return to their tenement, they see a crowd and the cops pulling a body out of the wreckage. Tommy tells the police where to find the body of the sailor that the Kellersons rolled.Director Ted Tetzlaff does a good job of creating characters and suspenseful situations. There are some moments of heart-stopping tension when Joe searches for Tommy in a decrepit apartment building. "The Window" exemplifies textbook terror tactics at their best. The ill-fated Bobby Driscoll does a marvelous job as the nine-year old witness to a murder, and Paul Stewart is sinister as the murderer who has no qualms about killing a child.

In its day (it was made in 1947 around the time Howard Hughes bought RKO and in his wisdom he had it shelved until, short of product in 1949, it was finally released) this must have been highly effective. Watching it today it is easy to compare it with Rear Window and watch it come off worse but Rear Window had a budget arguably 20 to 30 times that of The Window, it was shot in color, had Internationally known stars - James Stewart, Grace Kelly - plus an Internationally celebrated (albeit vastly overrated) director, Alfred Hitchcock. The irony is that both films were based on stories by William Irish/Cornell Woollrich. Okay, to rack up the tension it is necessary to have the father (Arthur Kennedy) work nights and the mother (Barbara Hale) leave the nine-year-old boy (Bobby Driscoll) alone in the apartment AFTER the two killers (Paul Stewart, Ruth Roman) on the floor above KNOW that he saw them kill the sailor. As well as this in 1949 no one was wondering aloud what a sailor was doing in a strange apartment in the first place (apart from getting rolled by Roman, that is); it's clear that Roman was a hooker, or at least had picked up the sailor and led him to believe she would have sex with him because nothing else makes sense. Chances are she and Stewart did this on a regular basis but this time it went wrong. It packs a lot into 79 minutes and the acting is, if anything, superior to that in Rear Window. Well worth the price of a DVD.

Barbara Hale, Arthur Kennedy Ruth Roman, Bobby Driscoll and Paul Stewart star in "The Window," a 1949 film.In a takeoff of the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Tommy Woodry is an only child with a very active imagination. He is known among his friends and parents as being a teller of tall tales. One night, it's so hot in their New York apartment that Tommy goes onto the fire escape to sleep. There, looking in the next apartment, he witnesses a murder. The problem is, no one believes him. Except the killers.Good nail-biter with lots of references to corporal punishment for kids, which was common back then. It's plenty of violence, too, as well as a dramatic ending.Arthur Kennedy was one of the most underrated actors in show business - though this is a good film, it's a small one, and he deserved something with a higher profile. Barbara Hale, just a few years later would achieve TV immortality as Della Street, Perry Mason's secretary. At 27, Ruth Roman makes an impression as Mrs. Kellerton, who was involved in the killing. She's both beautiful and frightened.The actor who plays the little boy, Bobby Driscoll was very good and continued to work until around 1960, when drugs and a criminal record kept him from getting work. He died at 31 of heart problems, penniless and homeless.Good movie, worth seeing.