The Woman in the Window 1/14

The German director Fritz Lang was a very direct link between the German expressionist films of the '20s and film noir. Lang claimed that he fled Germany immediately after Joseph Goebbels invited him to become the head of a nationalized film industry under Nazism. In the US, he directed some of the classics of noir.

In The Woman in the Window, a mild-mannered professor falls under a woman's spell and finds himself enmeshed in a web of criminality, deception, and homicide. (The professor is our friend Edward G. Robinson.) Lang got around some of the strictures of the Code by framing the main action as a dream.