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The oneiric escape-hatch of The Woman in the Window is no longer an option, the Greenwich Village Trauerspiel is pursued all the way through. The middle-aged cashier (Edward G. Robinson) is a repressed soul, his solitary joy of painting under the eye of the emasculating wife (Rosalind Ivan) means an easel in the bathroom. "To be loved by a young girl" is the clandestine desire, she (Joan Bennett) turns up one night in a transparent raincoat, "Lazy Legs" to her loutish beau (Dan Duryea). She in no time has the infatuated patsy paying for a penthouse while recoiling from his every caress, he offers to paint her so she presents her toes: "They'll be masterpieces." Fritz Lang's La Chienne is not Renoir's, naturally, his New York transposition is a stunning private inferno, a key Forties vision. The indolent demimondaine is just the muse for the gentleman who "walks around with everything bottled up," the scoundrel crouched by the building's steps dissolves to a serpent on the canvas. "The Happy Household Hour" on the neighbor's radio, "Melancholy Baby" on a cracked record, the disordered love nest under a high-angled microscope. "Who do you think you are, my guardian angel?" "Not me, honey. I lost those wings a long time ago." A lesson in art, works contemplated by fellow daubers ("a certain peculiar... something") and critics ("a masculine force"). Forgery is a matter of ideal husband resurrected as blackmailing sot, after-hours embezzling at the office gives a foreglimpse of Marnie. Tears to laughter to terror before an icepick, the electric chair turned on in Sing Sing is a neon sign flickering outside a flophouse window. "Yes, that's one thing I could never master, perspective." Punishment is to be alone with spectral voices in a teeming Christmas-time boulevard, a drop of pity showing through Lang's clinical gaze. Cinematography by Milton Krasner. With Margaret Lindsay, Jess Barker, Charles Kemper, Anita Bolster, Samuel S. Hinds, Vladimir Sokoloff, Arthur Loft, and Russell Hicks. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |