This is a solid little movie inspired by the Aesop fable about the boy who cried “Wolf!,” a fact admitted onscreen even before the opening credits roll.  There can be little in the way of surprise, since we already know what’s going to occur:  a youngster will tell tales, then see something evil and nobody will believe him.  The story is eminently familiar to all; and yet The Window (1949) still delivers more than its share of suspense, drama and thrills.  This is the perfect example of a simple, even obvious idea shaped and molded into a sharp, taut, clever and utterly believable motion picture.

Much of the credit should go to youngster Bobby Driscoll, just 12 when he made this film.  Driscoll appears in the majority of the shots,  giving a performance of sensitivity and depth.  He won a special Oscar in 1949, partly due to this movie, indicating the respect he earned for his efforts.  Driscoll was a very popular child star but could not sustain his stardom into his adult years.  Sadly, he was found dead in an abandoned NYC tenement building in 1968, much like the one in which The Window’s climax takes place.

Driscoll is superb in the film, but so is the writing, the film editing (Oscar-nominated) and the cinematography.  The manner in which Driscoll’s parents (Barbara Hale and Arthur Kennedy) refuse to listen to him even as they urge him to tell them the truth is outstanding.  The irony created by the killers learning about the boy’s surveillance of them from his parents and the police is sublime, and the final, climactic chase through the abandoned building is beautifully shot and hair-raisingly tense.

Placing children in peril is an age-old cinematic tradition; it is often a transparent ruse to cover shoddy story telling or a concerted attempt to construct adult stories around child protagonists, which I find hard to swallow for many reasons.  The Window tells its cautionary tale with honesty, complexity and bravado.

My rating:  ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2.  (10:3).