THE WINDOW
SOME OF YOUR AUGUST 2003 RMC RESULTS ARE IN!!!
When I was maybe 9 or 10, I was sick for a week. I stayed home from school, in my pajamas all day. It's back so long ago, I was cute. Anyway, I don't know if they had this where you lived, but we had an afternoon movie show called MILLION DOLLAR MOVIE. I don't know why, but they ran the same movie every day for 5 days. Well, I caught THE WINDOW on Monday, and loved it so much, I watched it all 5 days.
So this is the 6th time I saw this movie. You know how a lot of times you see something from when you were a kid and it simply doesn't hold up? This isn't one of them. Oh, do I love love love this film. Of course at 9 I didn't know what noir meant, or shots that were composed to make adults look menacing in a kid's world, or shadows, or anything. All I really knew is this movie was awesome (although I probably said "neat" or "cool").
I suppose it's REAR WINDOW (more on this later) with a kid. And not only is he set up as a storyteller, but a title card in the opening of the film (more on this later as well) mentions "the boy who cried wolf." So, it's very clear what's next. The murder happens within 12 minutes. They set up the kid and the parents, and then Tommy witnesses a murder. And no one believes him. Not his parents, nor the police. So, the remainder of the movie is split between him desperately trying to get an adult to believe him, and the killers themselves trying to find out exactly what he knows.
There's a ton of suspense in this film. Almost from top to bottom. It's also really short. Maybe 75 minutes. But a nice ride.
And Max Steiner did the score. You can almost hear the KING KONG violins.
Here's some stuff I learned on IMDB: The director, Ted Tetzlaff, was a cinematographer, and he shot NOTORIOUS (my fave Hitchcock) 3 years earlier. He died 8 years ago. I didn't recognize the other 14 films he directed. The kid, apparently on loan from Disney, was played by Bobby Driscoll. He would later be the voice of Peter Pan. He was in TREASURE ISLAND, SONG OF THE SOUTH, and won an Outstanding Child Actor Academy Award for THE WINDOW.
Note of irony: At the beginning of the movie, Tommy (Bobby Driscoll) is playing in an abandoned building in NYC (Brooklyn, I think). The film ends here as well. In real life, Driscoll died in a vacant NYC building from a drug overdose. He was 31.
The guy who wrote the story is Cornell Woolrich (a/k/a William Irish). He, like Hitch, started out doing titles for silent films. But get this- he also wrote the story for REAR WINDOW. How did he do that? How did he do that and get away with it? Nothing wrong with that, but how! Oh, and he also wrote on ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, and another anthology show I loved from England called JOURNEY TO THE UNKNOWN. He died in 68, the same year as JOURNEY. But yet, there are still many things he did AFTER his death. It seems a lot of his stories and novels were published posthumously.
When I was maybe 9 or 10, I was sick for a week. I stayed home from school, in my pajamas all day. It's back so long ago, I was cute. Anyway, I don't know if they had this where you lived, but we had an afternoon movie show called MILLION DOLLAR MOVIE. I don't know why, but they ran the same movie every day for 5 days. Well, I caught THE WINDOW on Monday, and loved it so much, I watched it all 5 days.
So this is the 6th time I saw this movie. You know how a lot of times you see something from when you were a kid and it simply doesn't hold up? This isn't one of them. Oh, do I love love love this film. Of course at 9 I didn't know what noir meant, or shots that were composed to make adults look menacing in a kid's world, or shadows, or anything. All I really knew is this movie was awesome (although I probably said "neat" or "cool").
I suppose it's REAR WINDOW (more on this later) with a kid. And not only is he set up as a storyteller, but a title card in the opening of the film (more on this later as well) mentions "the boy who cried wolf." So, it's very clear what's next. The murder happens within 12 minutes. They set up the kid and the parents, and then Tommy witnesses a murder. And no one believes him. Not his parents, nor the police. So, the remainder of the movie is split between him desperately trying to get an adult to believe him, and the killers themselves trying to find out exactly what he knows.
There's a ton of suspense in this film. Almost from top to bottom. It's also really short. Maybe 75 minutes. But a nice ride.
And Max Steiner did the score. You can almost hear the KING KONG violins.
Here's some stuff I learned on IMDB: The director, Ted Tetzlaff, was a cinematographer, and he shot NOTORIOUS (my fave Hitchcock) 3 years earlier. He died 8 years ago. I didn't recognize the other 14 films he directed. The kid, apparently on loan from Disney, was played by Bobby Driscoll. He would later be the voice of Peter Pan. He was in TREASURE ISLAND, SONG OF THE SOUTH, and won an Outstanding Child Actor Academy Award for THE WINDOW.
Note of irony: At the beginning of the movie, Tommy (Bobby Driscoll) is playing in an abandoned building in NYC (Brooklyn, I think). The film ends here as well. In real life, Driscoll died in a vacant NYC building from a drug overdose. He was 31.
The guy who wrote the story is Cornell Woolrich (a/k/a William Irish). He, like Hitch, started out doing titles for silent films. But get this- he also wrote the story for REAR WINDOW. How did he do that? How did he do that and get away with it? Nothing wrong with that, but how! Oh, and he also wrote on ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, and another anthology show I loved from England called JOURNEY TO THE UNKNOWN. He died in 68, the same year as JOURNEY. But yet, there are still many things he did AFTER his death. It seems a lot of his stories and novels were published posthumously.
