Look in Any Window (1961)

Posted by Night Editor

Poor Craig Fowler. His father, Jay (Alex Nichol) is a self-pitying drunk who’s just lost his job. His mother, Jackie (Ruth Roman) is fed up with it all and is looking to step out with the neighborhood skirt-chaser Gareth Lowell (Jack Cassidy).

Meantime, Craig, played by a young Paul Anka, is struggling to deal with sexual and other insecurities, mostly by skulking around at night in a rubber fright mask and peering in neighbors’ windows to discover what really goes on behind closed doors.

If it all sounds a little tawdry, it is. It’s a time when Hollywoodland was taking a jump off the juvenile delinquency bandwagon of the late ‘50’s onto that of the degenerative exploitation noir of the ‘60’s and Look in Any Window has its feet dangling off the back of both.

However the film turns out to be a lot better than the sum of its cheap generic and commercial parts – partly due to the large talents of the actors at hand and a well-crafted and tenable script by Lawrence E. Mascott, whose only other brush with noir was a single teleplay written for the ‘Johnny Staccato’ series with John Cassavetes (more on him later).

For its story Look in Any Window forages among Southern California’s burgeoning suburbs and its newly-affluent middle-class who want the good things in life and lots of them – cars, swimming pools, televisions, stereos, BBQ’s and a lifestyle to go.

No big surprise but no one seems any the happier for any of it. The husbands are busy bringing home the bacon (and doing some illicit porking on the side), the wives hang out by the pool all day looking into the abyss, and the kids are doing whatever they’re fated to do.

If all this weren’t enough, it also appears there’s a peeping tom (or worse!) on the prowl. Folks are distraught and their cause for alarm brings in the cops in the form of a couple of plainclothes officers who are assigned to 24 hour lookout (now those were the days).

The two, as the British would say, are like chalk and cheese. Officer Webber (the cheese) played by Dan Grayam, is a nineteen-year veteran who just wants to catch the lurker and teach him a lesson he’ll never forget.

The other, Officer Lindstrom (the chalk) played by Robert Sampson is a ‘college man’ who’s taken psychology courses but has only got four years in on the force. He’d rather start by finding out what the culprit’s real problem might be.

As the two of them watch and wait, they get a look-in on the sexual infidelity, the chronic boozing and the domestic upheaval and serve in situ as color commentators to the goings-on.


Their incidental chorusing is a contrivance but it’s an interesting one. Again, although basically a trashy late period B noir, Look in Any Window never fails in some way to engage or surprise.

This was director William Alland's only film as a director, after a career as a producer of mostly B-level westerns, science fiction and horror movies (The Creature of the Black Lagoon, The Colossus of New York, etc).

Nevertheless his direction here is well-informed, often alluding to the visual and narrative immediacy of neo-realism as well as just holding to the standard Hollywood studio style. It’d be nice to imagine that given further opportunity as a director, Alland might have become a commercial lower-rent version of John Cassavetes. As writer David Thompson has observed. Cassavetes favored stories of ‘basic, unenlightened, unhappily successful people… a rarity and rigorously shunned in American films’. Well, you got ‘em here.

Conversely, cinematographer W. Wallace Kelly also brings some timely touches of noir-bent expressionism to the film, much of which takes place in the darkness of evening and night. Kelly never really got closer to evincing a noir style on any other movie he’d been involved in (second unit duties on Vertigo not really qualifying) but in Look in Any Window he certainly appears aware of the option to do so.

However what’s best in the movie are lead actors Ruth Roman and Carole Mathews, who give terrific and uncomfortably knowing performances as the neighborhood’s dominant homemakers. They’re both attractive, smart, and overtly sexual women in their 40’s who want and need to be more than just material girls and handmaidens to louts. In this part of town, that may be expecting too much.

Mathew’s performance in particular is affecting, as her character Betty tries so hard to keep her family together, if only for the daughter’s sake. At the same time is she is so tempted by her next-door neighbor, a courtly Italian widower (George Dolenz) who appears to show appreciation for her intelligence as well as her body in a bathing suit - unlike her philandering husband, Gareth (Cassidy) who doesn’t appear to appreciate anything about her, nor that much about their daughter, Eileen (Gigi Perreau).

Cassidy always can be counted on for a bombastic performance but thankfully, he stops well-short of redlining with this one. However, Gareth remains a total jerk right to the very last. When Betty tells him she’s leaving and that she hopes his money will buy him happiness, he just sloughs her off, saying, ‘With money, who needs happiness’.

What about the hapless Greg (Anka)? We know really just needs: a) a nice girl with whom lose his virginity and b) a chance to see his parents wise up and get back to acting something like the responsible adults one presumes they once were.

By the end of the movie, we’re almost there, as everyone begins to realize the consequences of their actions. After a scary showdown, Greg finds a sympathetic ear from the cops and an even more sympathetic heart in the girl next door. It’s a start on the road to recovery – or recidivism. We’ll never know.

Anka at this point in his career is hardly an actor but his inadequacy as a performer actually serves the role he’s been asked to play. He’s a doofus but that plays here well enough.

With even a slightly bigger budget and a real box-office cast, Look in Any Window might have ended up being another studied and overblown paean to youthful alienation like Rebel Without a Cause – a movie which now feels ‘paean-fully’ dated.

Fortunately, circumstances conspired in the film to keep things more-or-less honest and sincere. Yes, sometimes sleazy, sometimes creepy but in the end this minor noir-stained drama also comes across as respecting its story and characters.

Look in Any Window itself may not be big, but it is small - and in the end, the better for it as it manages to rise just far enough above its trashy self to succeed as something else– usually the sign of a worthwhile B feature, which this one definitely is.