THE four murder films—“Hangover Square,” “The Ministry of Fear,” “The Woman in the Window” and “The Suspect”—are clever, entertaining, cynical about murder and the law, and unnecessarily cruel. One of the major drives in these films is to pulverize you with anxiety by putting the hero through an endless number of life-threatening situations. I think this wish to scare the audience and keep it in a constant state of horror has been used in every recent murder film I’ve seen to an unjustified extent, and with a good deal of deliberate cruelty on the part of writers and directors. Less important than the possible sadism involved is the fact that the movies get overloaded with scare devices to the point where they seem more like comic opera than is good for them. The need to suggest evil at every turn leads to such moments as the one in “Hangover Square” in which a close-up of the hero’s hands, innocently cleaning up some stains on his coat, is used to suggest the murder those hands are capable of.
All of these films are dominantly playing at crime as well as dabbling in some questionable moral attitudes. “The Suspect” projects a two-time murderer as a thoroughly good and happy character before, during and after his crimes. Its condoning of his first murder—of an awful, nagging wife—is a radical enough moral attitude to call for more argument than it gets in the film. The second murder—of an ineffectual blackmailer—is also condoned in what seems to me an even more cold-blooded way, and has so little motive that both the action and the leniency toward it seem fruitless. “The Ministry of Fear” tosses off the idea of mercy-killing as lightly as if it were examining the putting of a penny in a nickel slot machine, but its failure to look with any concern at the fact is part of its general lack of love for anything except what is suspense-making. Like all of these films, “The Woman in the Window” presents the murderer as a gentle, well meaning, law-abiding person. It shows him killing in self-defense, having no doubts about it, and worse, attempting to keep the murder secret; the movie then takes it all back by showing that it was a dream. That only adds one more unpleasant trick to the movie’s heavy supply, and adds nothing to its puny argument for murder in self-defense and for distrust of the law.
The mystery film is sometimes thought—I think wrongly—to be a form in which Hollywood is more realistic, spade-calling and unrestricted than it is in Westerns, bedroom farces, epics and other forms. The photography in “The Suspect” and “The Ministry of Fear,” which isn’t watered down or velvety in texture, is good as compared to current Hollywood standards, and the sets are above the average in favoring accuracy over vagueness. The characters, though, are allowed to roll around as incredibly and easily in evil as other movie characters roll around in goodness. All the mysteries that I’ve seen in recent years restrict themselves to a trashy showing of the murder, the plight of the murderer, a bit of his virility and of his love life. They show much less of the relationship of his crime to his environment and to other people, and less of himself than such films as “I Am a Fugitive” or “Public Enemy,” which weren’t “American Tragedy’s” for thoroughness themselves. The current crime films are far less daring than the old gangster pictures in what they say, and they are alarmingly short on spontaneity or originality. They seem to me very mechanical, cautious and petty.
“The Suspect” is my favorite of these new films because it has tried to create character and to rework its ideas—which have been done before by Hitchcock, von Stroheim and pre-Nazi German movies—with the most vivacity. It does a canny, human job in getting across the purity of the hero’s humility and generosity, and does equally well in making his successful marriage to a girl half his age and several times better looking seem both possible and happy in an adult way. The “moods” of the composer in “Hangover Square,” which are caused by discordant sounds and lead to his killing people and then burning them, are realized in a good, painful way by some eardrum-cracking music and some good grimacing on the part of the composer, and it deals efficiently enough with the trite material. “The Ministry of Fear” and “The Woman in the Window” are both directed by Fritz Lang, use the same self-conscious, over-emphatic villain, Dan Duryea, and are filled with blank people.
February 26, 1945