Thursday, November 9, 2023

The Shadow on the Window (1957)

An excellent Noir with some tasty detective work.


Little Petey (Jerry Mathers) witnesses something terrible happen to his mother Linda (Betty Garrett) and goes into a shocked trance. He is found wandering the roads when he is picked up. Now Petey is the son of Detective Tony Atlas (Philip Carey) and he tries to work out what has happened. Unfortunately no one knows where Linda is or what she was doing. In fact she is the prisoner of a group of thugs. As Tony begins a complicated investigation, the thugs begin to fall out putting Linda into even greater danger...

This is a good crime film with rising tension and a clever police procedural plot. The only flaw is the utter dopiness of the criminals but as we have seen in many films, if criminals were clever then they would probably never get caught!