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In the first scene of Fritz Lang's 1944 film noir Woman in the Window, Edward G. Robinson's character, Richard Wanley, a professor of psychology, is lecturing on the psychological motivations of homicide. We see his psychoanalytic bent visually captured by the words marked on the chalkboard behind him—“Sigmund Freud,” “transference,” “instinct.” His lecture begins with the biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not kill,” and he continues by describing the impulses behind homicide and theories of legal culpability. Soon enough, these descriptions will no longer remain academic.
Professor Wanley is conventionally upright by habit, demeanor, and disposition. The structure of his character virtually guarantees that he would not succumb to his impulses. However, he has grown accustomed to the solidity and stodginess of what he has become. At the same time, he wishes for an adventuresome spirit but fears that spirit. In the beginning scenes, the tensions around these conflicts quietly mount.
We soon discover that Wanley's wife and children are to travel away, leaving him on his own. We learn about this when he joins what he calls his two “middle-aged friends” for drinks at their men's club. His two friends, a District Attorney played by Raymond Massey and a physician played by Edmund Breon, offer us two more authoritative perspectives on morality and impulse. The friends joke about what to do with Wanley's new-found freedom: Should it be indulged or must it be contained? The