Film Noir: The Woman in the Window

From my class blog at Sex in American Cinema:




The German director Fritz Lang was a very direct link between the German expressionist films of the '20s and film noir. Lang claimed that he fled Germany immediately after Joseph Goebbels invited him to become the head of a nationalized film industry under Nazism. In the US, he directed some of the classics of noir. It's possible that the genre reflects the disillusionment of German refugees like Lang and Billy Wilder when they discovered the same struggles for power in the promised land of America that corrupted their native European world.
  In The Woman in the Window, a mild-mannered professor falls under a woman's spell and finds himself enmeshed in a web of criminality, deception, and homicide. (The professor is our friend Edward G. Robinson, Keyes in Double Indemnity.) Lang got around some of the strictures of the Code by framing the main action as a dream.
  (You can find the rest of the film on YouTube following this initial excerpt.)