Hitchcock for children

In Ted Tetzlaff’s The Window, based on a story by pulp writer Cornell Woolrich, one of Woolrich’s wonted ‘scared little guy’ protagonists is exactly that: a nine-year-old boy who witnesses a murder.

The film’s deft shooting, tight editing, and quick pace—it runs for little more than an hour—keep its child protagonist scarcely a step ahead of danger. 

Joe Kellerson (Paul Stewart) pursues the lone murder witness in The Window (1949). 

The story is a loose adaptation of Aesop’s The Boy Who Cried Wolf: a boy with an active imagination witnesses a murder. In this instance, and with the murderers hovering in pursuit, the boy nearly dies trying to convince adults—his parents, at their wits’ end over his tall tales about ‘indians and gangsters’, no less than the police—of what he saw.

Skeptical parents Mary (Barbara Hale) and Ed (Arthur Kennedy) Woodry in The Window (1949).

Tetzlaff shot the picture in a documentary style on location, in the then tenement-filled Lower East Side of Manhattan where Jacob Riis’s Other Half lived a half-century before, mostly from the boy’s point of view. It is similar in style to the 1953 classic The Little Fugitive by Morris Engel, Ray Ashley, and Ruth Orkin.

Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll) imagines adventure in The Window (1949).

Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll, whose work in this picture contributed to his honorary Academy Award in 1950) is a lonely only child with a lively fantasy life. In response to neighborhood boys’ teasing Tommy when he tells them he is getting a horse, Tommy assures them that his family is moving soon to a ranch in Texas, ‘to Tombstone, or wherever Tombstone is.’ Later the same day, having heard that the family is moving, the Woodrys’ building super knocks on the door of their apartment hoping to show the place to prospective tenants—the New York real estate scene is remarkably little changed. 

Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll) sleeping on the fire escape in The Window (1949)

And on a hot summer night Tommy gets his mother Mary (Barbara Hale) to let him sleep outside his bedroom window on the fire escape. Tommy sees a breeze blow laundry on the line above; he takes his pillow a floor higher and lies outside a window of the apartment upstairs. He hears a commotion inside. He watches wide-eyed through a partly-opened blind as the upstairs neighbors Joe Kellerson (perennial film noir bad guy Paul Stewart) and his wife Jean (Ruth Roman) roll and then murder a drunken sailor (Richard Benedict). Tommy slips away before the Kellersons see him. His challenge is making someone believe him.

Detective Ross (Anthony Ross) dubious of Tommy’s tale (Bobby Driscoll) in The Window (1949)

But everybody knows that the Kellersons are just an ordinary couple. Tommy’s parents Mary and Ed (Arthur Kennedy) fear that his story-telling may signal deeper psychological problems. A Hitchcockian dramatic touch comes when Mary marches the horrified Tommy upstairs to apologize to the Kellersons for telling his parents and the police stories about them—and of course tips off the Kellersons that someone may have seen what they were up to.

‘Normal neighbors’: Barbara Hale, Ruth Roman and Bobby Driscoll in The Window (1949)

When Tommy refuses to speak, his mother apologizes for him: ‘Please don’t pay any attention to him. He’s always making up stories. If it isn’t indians, it’s gangsters; and if it isn’t gangsters it’s something else. Someone’s always getting killed.’

Wide-eyed witness to a murder in Ted Tetzlaff’s The Window (1949).

The through-the-blind, voyeuristic element of the story makes it similar in effect to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window which also is based on a Cornell Woolrich story. Both Hitchcock and Woolrich told stories in which evil lurks just beneath the surface of the conventionally normal. This one is sweet, short, and satisfying.

WeeGee’s classic pic shows fire escapes were much more crowded.  

The Window 1949 U.S. (73 minutes) RKO Radio Pictures. Directed by Ted Tetzlaff; screenplay by Mel Dinelli based on the story The Boy Cried Murder by Cornell Woolrich; cinematography by Robert De Grasse and William Steiner; edited by Frederic Knudtson; produced by Frederic Ullman Jr. and Dory Schary.

Life in a Lower East Side street in Ted Tetzlaff’s The Window (1949)