hyped garbage

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

This movie begins interesting with likeable main character and great cinematography and for the first hour it's great but after that everything falls apart.In the third act we don't see the main character for about 20 min.I also didn't like the ending because the movie was quite dark and the ending makes everything a dream and it ends on a happy note.

He is a middle aged bachelor of some stability and position, when he sees a fascinating portrait in a window of a lady, and in the next moment sees the lady herself, watching his reaction, which appears to be a sport of hers, as many come to watch that portrait of her. She is not wicked or lewd, but she is dangerously attractive and has apparently attracted the wrong kind of man, who comes importuning as professor Robinson is cozying up to her, which leads to terrible complications, and there the nightmare starts, which mercilessly rolls on getting constantly worse as murders and casualties start piling up...It's one of Fritz Lang's most accomplished nightmare thrillers, maybe his best, and it's perfectly real all the way. Joan Bennett is attractive enough to be convincing, at her first entrance she is in fact absolutely irresistible, while Raymond Masset adds to the towering nightmare by his creeping investigations. You couldn't get into worse trouble than Robinsin does here, and the conclusion is perfectly logical in all its tragedy, while there still remains something left to surprise him...

I don't hold Lang in particularly high esteem, he has a bit of a rough hand for my taste. But he's one of few who can claim they invented noir as far back as the silent era, or laid all the groundwork for others to decorate with shadows and dames, so I will watch anything he does in this field with some interest.This is a very taut thing to say the least, a thriller par excellance. It has all the hallmarks; concentrated space, unfolds in real time, simple but smart setups of the bomb ticking beneath the table, to quote from Hitchcock.So it's not just that the noir schmuck has to sneak out of town with a corpse on his backseat, across empty streets at night, while omens abound everywhere he looks. He's also the most unlikely guy to ever find himself in this situation, a quaint college professor who had one drink too much with the wrong woman. And this explains perhaps why it's no more well known, say on par with Hitchcock. Edward Robinson is short, stocky, mousy, just perfect for the occasion but really far from the ideal leading man, Joan Bennett on the other hand is beautiful and fragile but is neither as radiant as a Gene Tierney.The main idea is twofold tension; on one hand the culprit is kept up to date every step of the investigation leading back to him, because his friend is the DA, on the other hand police are looking for who's in plain sight of them all this time. It works, even as a few of the slip-ups come across as forced and because we need the noose to tighten fast.But there is something else here that deserves mention. Oh, the final twist spells it out for us, but an observant viewer will have noted what goes on as soon as the professor is asleep and meets the woman in the picture.Between sleeps, we have a deliciously moral anxiety; a nightmare that vividly steers a middle-aged man away from desire that his friends openly indulge in, and no doubt he would as well, and back into social order.Oh, the message is stridently cautionary as was customary in Hollywood, even if a bit humorous. Watch Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie for the same motif - the mind asleep - improvised with more breath and soul.

While watching, smitten, the portrait of a beautiful woman in a window, a professor is addressed by the woman herself. After they exchange a few words, she invites him to her apt.. There, after enjoying themselves for a while, they are brutally interrupted by her boyfriend--it seems--who attacks the professor. This last kills the man in self-defense and now he and the woman must deal with the corpse, which he goes to drop in some park, and also with some unwelcome witness of events. Even worse, the crime detective working the case is one of his best friends.I have just finished watching this film and I have to say I liked it a lot better than Scarlet Street, which has the same leading actors and to which it has been rather unfavorably compared. Great cinematography, typical film noir settings--late night in the city, almost empty streets soaked wet after some rain--a dark, unsettling atmosphere, and the gig is on. TWITW would have been worth at least an 8/10, in my opinion, had not been for that silly twist, which allows for a more or less happy ending; one popping up like a rabbit out of a hat, as it doesn't come about as the inevitable result of the natural flow of the plot but which appears as if just tacked there, presumably for the relief of the viewing audience. This is made even worse by the final appearance of the two (dead) villains, now in far nicer, reassuring, attitudes--the only thing missing there is their complimentary bow to the audience. Definitively, the word End should have appeared in the screen during Alice's phone call, while Wanley is slowly drifting into eternal slumber. That would have made of TWITW a true classic of the genre. As it came out, it's not quite a film noir, just a project.What I liked better here is that the plot holds together far more tightly than it does in Scarlet Street. There is nothing forced in the plight of the two main characters-—prof. Wanley and Alice Green--which are after all rather normal people, instead of the stereotypical protagonists of a film noir, and so we all can related to them one way or another. The jam in which they find themselves is, unfortunately, like many we may get ourselves into, any day, even if not necessarily of the same dramatic proportions--just think about someone passing you by, at night, in an empty street, and pushing you and then you pushing the guy back, making him fall and hit his head on the pavement; and then he stays there without moving; what would you do then...? That's the kind of mess honest & decent people get into every day, every hour, somewhere in the world, in your own city. In Scarlet Street instead, both Chris & Kitty could have gotten out of their respective situations the moment they wished, as nobody was forcing them to be there. All what Chris had to do was to stop being a fool and for Kitty to give the pink slip to Johnny-well, that last part may have been a lot easier to say than to do, but anyway. That what's gives the whole situation in SS a contrived nature that allow viewers to stay emotionally detached from the plight of both main protagonists, which is not the case in TWITW.Also there's the fact that TWITW has characters you may actually like, something unusual in a film noir. I loved the Massey character, the way he toys with professor Manley, playing a rather suave, high brow, Columbo to him-—as I have no doubt he must have started suspecting from the beginning that his friend got something to do with that crime, that he knows more about it than he's willing to tell. And if any doubt still remained in his mind, that must have dissipated when Wanley went straight in the right direction, in the lieu of the crime, added this to his hand wound and his poison ivy infection. For most of the length of the movie that Columbo type fencing between both is delightfully entertaining and it's a real pity that all that should have ended with the arrival of the film's villain, Duryea's blackmailer. It's clear, anyway, when we see Massey for the last time--I think when he leaves the lieu of the crime in his car, with Robinson--that he's sure that, when this case is solved, of which he doesn't have by now any doubt, his academic friend will appear involved in it one way or another. It's unfortunate that this Columbo--like banter between Massey and Robinson wouldn't go farther than that, which costs the movie one point in my review. In that sense WITW looks like a film divided in two parts, with only the two leads of the first part remaining for the second.The cinematography is up to Lang standards I say, and the acting is superb across the board, specially from Robinson's part. (My, has this man ever been in a bad movie, has he ever done a bad acting job? I think the answer is No, in either case). A definitive 8/10, if were not for that twist at the end. Come to think of it, maybe this is the reason behind it: the Code demands that people pay for their crimes and if WITW had ended during that phone call, Alice wouldn't have paid for having been an accomplice in the murder. Quite the contrary, she would have been the main beneficiary and, while it's true that she had lost her Sugar Daddy anyway, a girl with her looks wouldn't have had any problem finding another. So, maybe Lang, or the studio, felt forced to end the film that way, just to prevent her from remaining unpunished.