Look in Any Window (Scott R. Dunlap Productions, Allied Artists, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8:45 p.m. I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies that proved unexpectedly interesting: Look in Any Window, a title that’s an obvious knockoff of the 1949 classic Knock on Any Door (directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and John Derek – Bogie and Bo Derek, one degree of separation!). The film was shown as part of a month-long festival of films about what quaintly used to be called “juvenile delinquency,” though as one of the characters points out, “There’s a thing called adult delinquency, too,” and that’s basically the theme of the movie. It’s set in a small and relatively affluent suburban community – I don’t think the film specified its location but it looks likes the L.A. area – and the central characters are Jay Fowler (Alex Nicol), a civilian mechanic for the Air Force who’s just been fired from a job and returns from his assignment in Alaska with his dismissal notice, to which he responds by ramping up his already formidable alcohol consumption; his wife Jackie (Ruth Roman), who’s getting restive at home and looking for other emotional and sexual opportunities; and their son Craig (Paul Anka, in his third film), who’s become a peeping Tom, going out at night wearing a preposterous mask and scaring the neighbors as he spies on them. The other leading family in the movie are the Lowells: husband Garrett (Jack Cassidy, in his first film), a well-off car dealer (he drives an Alfa-Romeo sports car and we’re evidently supposed to think that represents his usual stock) who has enough money to have a swimming pool on his property around which much of the action centers; his long-suffering wife Betty (Carole Matthews), who’s having an attack of “the problem that has no name” well before Betty Friedan articulated it; and their daughter Eileen (Gigi Perreau), who’s trying to be a nice girl and ward off the attention of the neighborhood J.D.’s.

The film was produced by William Alland, who had got his start in films playing the reporter Thompson who does the interviews in Citizen Kane and then decided to become a producer himself. He not only produced this one, he co-wrote the script and directed as well, and while Look in Any Window is his sole directorial credit he’s actually quite good. In the 1950’s he’d been put in charge of Universal-International’s science-fiction and horror films, and there’s a quite impressive Gothic flair to much of the direction here. The plot gimmick is that Anka’s nocturnal wanderings and the efforts of the neighbors – including the town’s other teenage guys as well as a couple of LAPD officers, one a patrolman and one a detective, to catch him catalyze the situation and essentially lead to the revelations of all the town’s dirty secrets. It’s basically Rebel Without a Cause meets Peyton Place, and though Anka is top-billed he pretty much fades into the woodwork. At one point the three hard-core J.D.’s in the town offer to take Anka’s character to a “party,” promising him a sexually available girl, though it’s pretty clear they really want to ambush him and beat him up. Later Anka takes a sip of his father’s half-finished whiskey glass and at first can’t stand it, but eventually it emboldens him and he makes a crude pass at Elaine after she’s just returned home in disgust from a “date” with one of the J.D.’s, who drives a hot-rodded Ford pickup (we know it’s a hot rod because it has no hood and we see a gleaming carburetor mounted on top of its engine) and takes her on a “date” but really wants to have sex with her.

The adults are, if anything, screwing around even more than the kids: Garrett Lowell and Jackie Fowler are having an affair – and, like the adulterers in the recent Lifetime movie Secrets of a Marine’s Wife, they’re hardly bothering to conceal it, necking with each other in public in ways we feel would surely be discovered. At one point Garrett wants to drive out to Las Vegas at midnight with his wife for some quick play at the casinos, and when she turns him down he takes Jackie instead – and Jackie departs so abruptly she leaves the hose with which she was watering her lawn turned on. (Her son Craig turns it off in one of his nocturnal prowls.) Meanwhile the abandoned Betty Lowell spends an evening téte-a-téte with Lindstrom (Robert Sampson), a scientist who’s recently moved to the neighborhood. He’s a widower whose two kids are away in boarding school on the East Coast, and like every other maie in this movie (except Jay Fowler, who’s too plastered to do anything sexual with his wife or anyone else) he’s only after one thing from a woman … Look in Any Window is actually a surprisingly good movie – I wasn’t expecting much in the way of quality, but it turned out to be a tough-minded exposé of suburban amorality whose message was, “How can we expect our kids to behave when we don’t?” And there was at least one other Citizen Kane alumnus involved besides William Alland: the makeup artist was Maurice Seiderman, whom Orson Welles brought to Hollywood to figure out how to age Charles Foster Kane through the course of the film – but who didn’t get credit on Kane because the makeup artists’ union had blackballed him. (Welles took out an ad in the trade papers to credit his contribution.) If Look in Any Window has a flaw, it's it's raison d’etre, Paul Anka, who delivers a depressingly incompetent non-performance in a role Sal Mineo from the Rebel Without a Cause cast could have played to perfection – a shy, rather nellie wanna-be who isn’t really comfortable either trying to be a nice kid or trying to be a J.D. – but other than that Look in Any Window is a quite powerful, unsparing movie thqt deserves to be better known.