LOOK IN ANY WINDOW (1961)

 

By Gary Deane

 

“Nothing between their secrets and the neighborhood except a pane of glass!.”

 

“Adults who want new sensations out of life…before it’s too late! Kids who want to find out what it’s all about…too early!”

 

Poor Craig Fowler. His father, Jay (Alex Nichol), is a self-pitying drunk who’s just been fired from his job as an aircraft mechanic. His mother, Jackie (Ruth Roman), is fed up to here and has begun trading sideways glances with the neighborhood skirt-chaser, Gareth Lowell (Jack Cassidy). Meantime, Craig (played by a sixteen-year-old Paul Anka) has taken to skulking around at night in a rubber mask, peeking through bedroom windows in hopes of seeing what goes on behind closed doors. It's tawdry stuff but then by the early 1960s, classic noir had long since crossed over to the seamier side of the street.

Look in Any Window forages for its noir-stained drama among Southern California’s burgeoning suburbs and newly-affluent middle-class who lust after the good things in life---flashy cars, color televisions, backyard swimming pools, built-in barbeques, and the ’lifestyle’ to go with. Not that anyone looks to be any the happier. Husbands work late to bring home the bacon (while enjoying a little something on the side) while the wives sit by the pool all day, drinks in hand. As for the kids, they do whatever they want.

Meanwhile, there is the problem of a peeping tom on the prowl. Folks are in a panic and their complaints to the police bring out a couple of plainclothes officers---one of them with profiling experience---who are assigned to a 24-hour lookout. While they watch and wait, the two witness the chronic boozing, the flagrant affairs, and the domestic upheaval. Eventually, Craig will be caught and unmasked. But by that time, the cops have come to their own conclusions about what’s wrong with the picture.

Despite the cheesy taglines, Look in Any Window is a movie with something to say. It also does a good job of saying it, ringing truer than Rebel Without a Cause (1955), a once film célèbre that today looks and feels ridiculously overwrought.

At the heart of Look in Any Window are the neighborhood’s pair of dominant homemakers and pool-party organizers, played by Roman and Carole Mathews, both of whom give compelling performances. Their characters are smart, attractive, and libidinous females in their late ’30s, who married young and now want to move beyond their everyday existences as material girls and handmaidens to louts. Mathews is especially affecting as Betty, who works hard at keeping her family together, if only for her daughter’s sake. At the same time, she’s increasingly drawn to her next-door neighbor, a courtly Italian widower (George Dolenz) who is as appreciative of her curiosity and intelligence as he is of her figure in a one-piece. On the other hand, the philandering husband, Gareth, shows little regard for either her or their teenage daughter, Eileen (Gigi Perreau). Gareth is a jerk, and when Betty tells him she’s going to leave him and that she hopes his money will buy him happiness, he shrugs and says, “With money, who needs happiness”.

Cassidy was an actor with matinee good looks, as suave and self-confident in real life as he was on the screen. Perfect for the part, he evinces the kind of preening arrogance that comes with an ego as unchecked as Gareth’s. Cassidy came to Hollywood from the stage and his acting often tilted toward the theatrical. In Look in Any Window, he backs off the gas a little. It’s one of his more natural screen performances---and one of his best.

As for the hapless Craig, all he needs is a girl with whom he can share his troubles (and probably his virginity); also for his parents to start acting like adults. After his arrest, Craig at least gets a sympathetic ear from the police and, later, the girl next door. Paul Anka (in his first starring role) was not yet the actor he'd become only a couple of years later in The Longest Day (1962). However, his shortcomings as the young and ill-fated doofus in Look in Any Window serve the picture well.

Look in Any Window was also William Alland's first (and only) outing as a screen director.  Up until then, he had worked primarily as a producer on low-budget westerns and science fiction programmers such as The Creature of the Black Lagoon, a landmark science fiction title of the era. However, Alland’s resume also included time spent in New York as a stage and radio actor with Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater, along with contemporaries Joseph Cotton, Norman Lloyd, and Agnes Moorehead. 

Alland also was a friend of Look in Any Window's screenwriter Lawrence E, Mascott who’d done episodes for the television series, Johnny Staccato starring actor, and later director, John Cassavetes. Of Cassavetes, British writer/ critic David Thompson observed that the filmmaker had always looked for inspiration in “stories of basic, unenlightened, unhappily successful people...a rarity, and rigorously shunned in American films.” This would describe equally the characters in Look in Any Window, an ersatz piece of American Neo-Realism that plays like something which Cassavetes, a native New Yorker might have conjured, had he been born and raised in Long Beach, California.

Look in Any Window conspires to rise above its low-rent origins and does so in unexpected ways,  engaging intimately with its characters and showing respect for their stories.  Well worth a peek.