Windows (1980)

Director:

Gordon Willis

Writer:

Barry Siegel (writer)

Release Date:

18 January 1980 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Thriller

Tagline:

Somebody loves Emily... too much

Plot:

Shire is the subject of a perverse obsession by a Lesbian neighbor, Ashley, who not only is in lust...

Awards:

5 nominations

Cast

Talia Shire	...	Emily Hollander
Joseph Cortese	...	Bob Luffrono
Elizabeth Ashley	...	Andrea Glassen
Kay Medford	...	Ida Marx
Michael Gorrin	...	Sam Marx
Russell Horton	...	Steven Hollander
Michael Lipton	...	Dr. Marin
Rick Petrucelli	...	Obecny
Ron Ryan	...	Detective Swid
Linda Gillen	...	Police Woman
Tony DiBenedetto	...	Nick
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Bryce Bond	...	Voice-over
Ken Chapin	...	Renting Agent
Marty Greene	...	Ira
Bill Handy	...	Desk Officer
Robert Hodge	...	Desk Sergeant
Kyle Scott Jackson	...	Detective
Pat McNamara	...	Doorman
Gerry Vichi	...	Ben

Also Known As:

Corky (USA) (working title)

Runtime:

96 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

Iceland:16 | Australia:R | Finland:K-16 | Germany:16 | USA:R | UK:18

Filming Locations:

New York City, New York, USA

Company:

Mike Lobell Productions

Trivia:

Final film performance of Kay Medford.

Movie Connections:

Featured in The Celluloid Closet (1995)

Age has done this movie a lot of good!

I love the Hollywood "thrillers" of the early 80s. It was such a funny time because the extreme success of the slasher films (HALLOWEEN, Friday THE 13th... The list is endless) drove Hollywood studio execs into the same arena, but most of them were afraid to make a straight horror film, possibly because they didn't want to taint their precious image... so instead they made a batch of mock high-brow thrillers, usually starring one or more name actors, which were really just slasher movies with comparatively deliberate pacing, smaller body counts and generally better film stock than their horror counterparts.

WINDOWS is one of those horror/slasher movies masquerading as a sophisticated thriller. It belongs on the same shelf as THE FAN (1981), starring Lauren Bacall, EYES OF A STRANGER (1981), with Lauren Tewes (then popular), WHEN A STRANGER CALLS (1979) with Carol Kane, and DRESSED TO KILL (1980) starring Angie Dickinson and Michael Caine. What do these films all have in common? They are SLASHER MOVIES, all dressed up to look like something more than they are.

Out of the lot of Hollywood thrillers from the early 80s, WINDOWS is unquestionably the most dramatically ambitious and controversial. For one thing, it's the only directorial effort from famed cinematographer Gordon Willis, who lensed THE GODFATHER PARTS 1 & II and many other major Hollywood movies. His cinematography was always breathtaking. Just prior to making WINDOWS, he had been working with Woody Allen on films like INTERIORS and MANHATTAN. Anyone who knows anything about Woody Allen's work knows that he is obsessed with the films of Ingmar Bergman, and I read that Willis shared much of that obsession. That's why WINDOWS plays like a Bergman attempt at the slasher-inspired thriller... which is ironic, since Bergman actually made a film in that vein the same year, called FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES (yes, a Bergman film about murder and sleaze, and it actually deserves company with the afore-mentioned thrillers, although it is far, far superior to all of them).

Talia Shire stars in WINDOWS, and as usual she gets the job done. She was good in ROCKY (the first one, that is) and she was getting some major film roles (she had just made OLD BOYFRIENDS, which is watchable disco-era tripe). She's nothing special in WINDOWS, but she's able to mope around N.Y.C. looking appropriately pathetic. Joseph Cortese, who was so great in DEATH COLLECTOR, does an equally decent job as the sympathetic yet tough-guy cop who takes a personal interest in Shire's case, and in Shire herself.

The plot is simple. Shire plays a woman who is outgrowing a stammering problem, and her goofball husband. She moved out and wants a divorce, believing that she is strong enough to stand on her own and find a real man who doesn't bore her. She has a new friend, a brash and domineering woman (played brilliantly by the always amazing Elizabeth Ashley) and things seem to be looking up. Then a creep attacks and rapes her (Rick Petrucelli, who you may remember from THE GODFATHER and as the guy who harasses Woody Allen in ANNIE HALL). Cortese's cop character gets involved with Shire and, through a series of credibility-straining coincidences, figures out who the rapist is... and who hired him to attack Shire.

I won't divulge any more of the plot, but let me just say - in the hope that I don't spoil anything here - that lesbian rights groups went nuts when this movie came out and protested theaters where it was being shown. A few fires were set as well, which prompted Warner - the American distributor of WINDOWS - to yank the film from distribution. It has never been released on video in the U.S. (yeah, that includes tape), although there is a PAL format tape that came out of the U.K. or Australia or somewhere (I saw a bootleg DVD-R of that tape).

I read that WINDOWS was the first movie to be released in 1980, and it didn't last two weeks in the theaters because of the controversy it garnered. It was a weird time for movies because people were protesting many of them. Slasher movies were being picketed, as were adult movie houses (the protests in the early 80s destroyed the porn movie theaters and all but dismantled the 42nd street movie houses). Some movies were driven out of theaters almost immediately after being released, most notably WINDOWS and Sam Fuller's brilliant WHITE DOG (1982), which the NAACP claimed was a racist film. (It's quite the opposite, in my opinion, but whatever.) So, is WINDOWS any good? Yeah, it's outstanding. It looks amazing (this was Gordon Willis' directorial debut... of course he's going to make it look like a million bucks!), the acting is better than average for this type of movie (and Elizabeth Ashley gives a performance worthy of study), the plot is bleak and compelling (and at times effectively scary), and New York looks great through Willis' lens, as usual. If you're interested in thrillers that are moody, somewhat credible and relatively intelligent, WINDOWS is one of the better ones out there, and best of all it's very unique.

Critics were hard on WINDOWS, but don't listen to them. They were being unnecessarily harsh on it because they were getting tired of violent cinema, but in truth WINDOWS isn't really very viscerally or graphically violent. It's an attempt to make an upper-crust thriller with horror elements while confronting issues that were at the time groundbreaking and potentially offensive.

Also, if you're interested in films that aroused controversy, this is a must-see, because very few films have invited such a violent response from the public... and the ones that did usually had something to do with Christ.