Old is gold?

Woman in the Window (2021)
Woman in the Window (1944)

After watching the 2021 version, which was entirely predictable, with a lot of screaming and display of feminine gusto, I also decided to view the 1944 one. I knew in the mind of minds that the older one, which has the classic black-and-white collection of nuances of acting and beautiful dialogue, will be a head-turner. I was not wrong.

There have been many rip-offs of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 'Rear Window'. If Steven Spielberg was taken to court for making 2007 'Disturbia', I wonder what they say about this. If in 1954, James Stewart was homebound after picking up a fracture while photographing, here in 2021, a psychologist, Dr Anna Fox  (Amy Adams), is confined to the four walls of her apartment complex due to a bad case of agoraphobia. 

We later learn that she had lost her daughter and husband in a nasty car accident during a winter retreat. She is the lone survivor, testing out a new medicine that may give side effects of hallucinations. She spends time watching old movies and looking out at the apartment across the road. So when she calls the police to report a murder in the apartment across, she is not taken seriously. Furthermore, the said murdered turned up in person! But, as expected, the absolute truth prevails, and after a blood bath, everything gets resolved.

The 1944 version is more of my kind of movie. It is a film noir of a simple plot that has had many copycat films that followed. The sensuality and femme fatale attraction are apparent even when both main characters are fully clothed in formal party attires. However, it is the mesmerising dialogue and the musical score that are the secrets.

A psychology Professor (Edward G Robinson) meets up with his friends in a gentlemen's club after sending off his kids and wife for a summer vacation. In the club, Professor and his friends, a doctor and a prosecutor, chat about a portrait of a woman displayed at a window outside the club. They sigh of declining vitality and reminiscing what their old self would have done if they were to meet in person the beautiful model posing for the picture.

As luck would have it, the friends leave the club and the good professor exits; hold behold, it is indeed the model as mentioned earlier (Joan Bennet). They struck a conversation, and they go for a drink, and they land up in her apartment. But, unfortunately, a man furiously turns up at the apartment in the dead of night and attacks the professor. In self-defence, aided b the model, the professor kills him with a pair of scissors.

The angry man was a bigshot and the model, his mistress. The next part of the story is about how they dispose of the dead body. The professor learns about the progress of the case, on the sly, from his prosecutor friend. Next, the bigshot's bodyguard tries to blackmail the model, threatening to tell the police that she is somehow involved with the deceased. Again, the professor is pulled into the fiasco.

Verdict: Woman in the Window (2021) is crap compared to its predecessor and namesake. The 1944 edition won, hands down.

Bennet's hairstyle is said to have
been styled after Hedy Lamarr's.

Hedy Lamarr. Once hailed as the prettiest woman in the world.

Lamarr's features were the prototype for Disney's Snow White.

However, she was no mere eye candy but a full-fledged scientist 

who is considered the inventor of the frequency-hopping method,

which is still used by many communication protocols,

including GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and CDMA.

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