This zippy little movie is a noir version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, with a fanciful boy witnessing a murder that no one will believe. The movie is nicely filmed. The camera is generally from little-boy height, with adults towering and powerful. Shadows are used effectively; there's a nice moment where as a murderer goes upstairs the shadow of the banister railing covers her face like prison bars. Bobby Driscoll is effective as the increasingly terrified boy, and Paul Stewart makes a wonderfully malevolent villain. The rest of the cast is solid though not especially memorable.Suspense ramps up nicely, and towards the end the movie is quite exciting. Overall, well worth watching.

Tommy Woodry is a young boy living in a poor tenement in NYC. He often makes up stories. His parents are frustrated with him. On one hot night, he goes out to sleep on the fire escape. While outside the upstairs apartment, he witnesses the Kellersons stabbing a man in the back with a pair of scissors. He tries to tell his parents but they don't believe him. He tells a police detective but he finds nothing. Tommy is forced to apologize by his mother to Mrs. Kellerson which only informs them of him as a witness.There is always great tension of a kid who nobody believes. This one takes the 'The Boy who Cried Wolf' fable and turns it into a tense noir. The little boy is pretty good in terms of a child actor. There are a couple of less believable things like the taxi driver. There must have been an impenetrable partition in that cab. Despite the little flaws, this is a solid thriller.

This is a surprisingly suspenseful thriller with a very good cast. The story takes place in a NYC walk up apartment building where a 9 year-old boy, Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll), lives with his mom (Barbara Hale) and dad (Arthur Kennedy). Tommy's dad has to work nights. Since Tommy is always making up stories about himself and others, his parents are concerned about his false story-telling problem. Is this just a phase or should they get some kind of professional help for Tommy? One hot summer night, Tommy asks his mother if he can sleep on the fire escape to cool down while he sleeps. She agrees. However, during the night on the fire escape, Tommy witnesses what he believes to be a murder. He witnesses this though a thin opening in a window shade from the upstairs apartment. When Tommy tells his mother what he witnessed, she tells him that he was just dreaming and should go back to sleep. Concerned, his mother tells his father and he, too, is concerned after questioning Tommy's story. With no one believing his story, Tommy reports it to the police. Fearing that the upstairs neighbors—the Kellersons (Paul Steward and Ruth Roman)--will kill him, Tommy asks the police not to identify him as the person reporting the murder. So, when a police officer goes to the Kellerson's apartment, he poses as a building inspector to check any potential "crime scene" that may be real. He finds nothing that the Kellersons cannot explain and proceeds to assume that Tommy's story was JUST a story. However, the Kellersons now know that they have to get rid of Tommy before he talks too much. To do this, they send a telegram to Tommy's mother to visit her sick sister. This leaves Tommy alone the following night which, in turn, leads to a terrifying cat-and-mouse game between Tommy and the Kellersons.....

Part of the appeal of the film noir genre has always been its ability to freeze everyday life from the past and redisplay it faithfully to viewers many decades later. It's one of the reasons why I enjoy the genre so much, and "The Window" does its job better that most. If you want to step into a time machine and see what real life was like in New York City in the 1940s, this is the movie to see. I saw it at a local film noir film festival, and I hope it comes out on DVD.It's a bit jarring to see Della Street as a gritty Manhattan housewife with a coarse blue-collar husband, but it's also a lot of fun and she looks terrific. Barbara Hale is still alive as I write this, amazingly, and will turn 91 in a few weeks. At the film festival, this film was introduced by someone who had telephoned Barbara Hale and asked her for her memories of making this movie. She said the movie was supposed to take place in the summer, so the actors dressed very lightly, but it was really filmed in a much colder time of year and she remembers freezing as they shot scene after scene. Could have fooled me, the movie comes across as summery and hot with lots of sweat.Every detail fascinated me, especially of apartment life in the 1940s: tiny rooms, closet-sized bathrooms with dwarf sinks, and kitchens that looked like airplane galleys. Dark and sinister stairwells up to dingy apartments, fire escapes and alleys, cigarettes galore, and black telephones like my grandmother used to have. Every scene is richly textured, almost as if the director knew that audiences of the distant future would be watching his movie and be mesmerized by the detailed scenery, from the local police station to the pay phone at the corner drugstore.Others have reviewed the plot and I have nothing much to add. But I will emphasize that the plot develops along paths that I would never have predicted, and the ending will rivet you to your seat. The conclusion was deeply satisfying and caused the audience to burst into whistles and applause. Hope this movie comes out on DVD quick... it's a treasure.