Windows is a movie of firsts and lasts: Windows is the first and last film to be directed by famed cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather, Annie Hall); It’s the first & last screenplay to be written by one Barry Siegel (not to be confused with the Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times journalist). It's the last major motion picture to feature up-and-coming The Godfather/Rocky alumna Talia Shire in a lead role; Windows being the three-strikes-you’re-out, last-straw flop that followed on the heels of the underperforming features Old Boyfriends (1979) and Prophecy (1979). Finally, Windows has the dubious distinction of being the first film to be released in 1980 (January 18th), but, seeing as it was pulled from theaters almost immediately after the near-unanimous critical drubbing it received, it's a good guess Windows also wound up as the last entry in 1980's year-end boxoffice tallies.
Talia Shire as Emily Hollander |
Elizabeth Ashley as Andrea Glassen |
Joe Cortese as Detective Bob Luffrono |
We know Emily regularly sees a therapist and that she struggles with a stutter. What we never find out is why Emily, like Olive Oyl, has a closet full of the exact same outfit. |
Physically unharmed but emotionally shattered, Emily reports the assault to a sensitive Italian police detective named Bob (cow-eyed Joe Cortese), but is understandably reluctant to go into details. Enter husky-voiced, over-solicitous neighbor and friend Andrea Glassen (Elizabeth Ashley), an affluent poet whose obscenely large and equally picturesque apartment in the same building suggests Emily is perhaps renting her closet. (Truth be told, Andrea may inhabit the same apartment building or live several miles away. For all the time invested in providing painterly images of New York, Windows takes a rather relaxed attitude when it comes to establishing location and proximity.)
While the traumatized Emily sits silently grappling with her feelings, Andrea spends her time shooting officer Bob lots of stony glances until either futility or boredom causes him to leave. In a refreshing departure from the usual suspense thriller gambit which contrives for a terrorized protagonist to remain living at the scene of the crime in order to better facilitate encore visits from the assailant, Windows has Emily hightailing out of her apartment the very next day and moving into a picturesque (what else?) Bridge Tower apartment across the river. A place with a spectacular view, ginormous picture windows, and a convenient shortage of drapes.
(You’ve been warned, spoilers to follow.)
Windows is the last film appearance of Oscar-nominated Funny Girl co-star Kay Medford. She portrays kind but apprehensive neighbor Ida Marx. Ida & Emily share a similar fashion sense |
To remind us that we're watching a thriller, Windows throws in a couple of off-screen murders and a scene of Emily discovering something unpleasant in her freezer wedged between the broccoli spears and Cool Whip. But for the most part, suspense is limited to wondering just how Nutso-Bismol Andrea is going to go before the inevitable showdown. A showdown brought about by the screenwriter having the characters do the absolute dumbest things possible at the absolute perfect time.
"Hello, Police? I just happened to catch a cab driven by the man who assaulted me...what should I do?" "Get back in the cab and have him drive you to the police station." "Oh, OK...will do!" |
Andrea's therapist (Michael Lipton) questions her about the authenticity of her love for Emily "Have you said how you feel?" "I will. I...I mean, I can't yet...but I will." |
Every move you make, every step you take, I'll be watching you The hit song by The Police was released in 1983, but it fits Windows to a T |
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As tends to be Hollywood's irresponsible wont, when it "discovers" gay people, it can only think to feature them in mainstream movies in the most sensational, exploitative ways possible. That's why 1980 saw the controversial release of two movies featuring violently psychopathic gay characters within one month of each other. January brought the psychotic lesbian of Windows, while William Friedkin's Cruising, slated for February release, granted us another film featuring a homicidal homosexual. Although Windows garnered its share of controversial press, advance word-of-mouth about the film was so poor that picketers didn't even bother to show up when I saw it on opening night.
I remember being less concerned about the controversy than I was overwhelmed at the prospect of what I was about to see. Anticipation was at an all-time high for I had worked myself into a frenzy thinking that Windows was going to be as scary as Klute, gritty as Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and as stylish as Eyes of Laura Mars. I had thoroughly convinced myself that this was going to be something really special. Advance word-of-mouth be damned.
Did Windows measure up to my expectations? Well, I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it. Indeed, I sat through it twice. But it wasn't because it was such a great thriller; I was riveted to my seat by the sheer weirdness of it all. It reminded me of that scene in Young Frankenstein when Igor drops the genius brain resulting in an abnormal brain ("Abby someone...Abby Normal") being inserted into the monster by mistake. Windows feels like the studio assembled an A-list cast and crew, sunk a lot of money into the budget, but at the last minute somebody slipped in a script for a low-rent, mid-'70s, grindhouse rapesploitation flick.
The one-two punch of Cruising and Windows appeared to be a harbinger of the decade to come. A time when Hollywood seemed primed to trade one dehumanizing, negative stereotype (the scary urban African-American of the Dirty Harry-'70s) for another (the homosexual as degenerate predator and killer) for the sake of a sensationalist buck. To put such offensiveness into context, it was bad enough that this unimaginative wave of cliche felt like a conservative negation of the pro-sex, gay-liberation vibe of the sexual revolution of the previous decade; but in so associating homosexuality with death, the timing couldn't have been worse, what with the specter of AIDS looming on the horizon of 1981. Inclusion certainly involves gay characters being allowed to be the heavy in movies, but the larger issue is one of proportion; with so few depictions of gay characters onscreen at all,
there is something inherently problematic with narratives that cast gays (traditionally the targets of bullying and violence at the hands of heterosexuals in real life), as agents of homicidal threat to victimized straights.
As the '70s came to a close, gay characters in films were still largely depicted in either comic or derogatory terms, so the gay community was right to protest this rare instance in which two major films with large roles for gay characters depicted both as pitiable psychopaths. Windows was so widely panned and dismissed that I honestly don't think it was still in theaters by the time Cruising opened just four weeks later on February 18th.
For me, the distancing of time has made Windows considerably less sensational, and in turn, the character of Andrea far less offensive...largely because she's so sketchily drawn she's less a human being than a plot contrivance.
The film's windows/lenses motif is carried over to Andrea's Brobdingnagian eyewear |
I think the cautious romance between Emily and Detective Bob is supposed to be touching, but at times they seem like they're mere moments from pledging a suicide pact |
I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Ashley, but it surprises me to think that outside of a TV movie or two, I've only seen her in this, Coma, and Ship of Fools. She has an intensity that makes her always interesting to watch, plus a kind of Susan Hayward propensity for overacting that challenges the believability of her characterizations. Playing a can't-win role, Ashley is really not that bad. Short of resorting to that "unblinking stare" thing that movie lesbians have been doing since Candice Bergen trained her gaze on Joanna Pettet in The Group, her stereotypically written role is mercifully devoid of grand "I'm a lesbian!" acting indicators. The screenplay does her no favors in the final scenes (where she's left to go right over the top without a net), but she definitely has her moments and her performance looks better to me now than it did in 1980.
Although Windows has an impressive pedigree and the odd cult cachet of being a film few people have liked, heard about, or seen; it's not, for me anyway, an undiscovered classic. What it does have is the stamp of being a visually stylish '70s-into-the-'80s curio which manages to be, by turns, both engrossing and off-putting.
BONUS MATERIAL
In 2007 Talia Shire appeared in a series of commercials for GEICO.com in which she portrayed a therapist to one of those cavemen that were so popular for 15-minutes back in the day—even getting their own ill-advised short-lived sitcom. Shire playing the silliness absolutely straight is really rather marvelous.
Commercial #1
Commercial #2
Commercial #3
Paperback tie-in novels adapted from screenplays were once a popular part of movie marketing. The novelization of Barry Siegel's screenplay for Windows was written by H.B. Gilmour. Gilmour carved out quite a career novelizing screenplays, a few of her many other paperback adaptations being: Saturday Night Fever, All That Jazz, and Eyes of Laura Mars
THE AUTOGRAPH FILES
Gordon Willis died in 2014 at the age of 82. This autograph is from 1984 when I was a dance extra in the awful John Travolta/Jamie Lee Curtis aerobics movie Perfect (1985), for which Willis served as cinematographer. Some of his other more distinguished films are: Annie Hall, All the President's Men, The Parallax View, Pennies from Heaven. Considered one of the most influential cinematographers of the '70s, he was nominated only twice (Zelig, The Godfather III), and was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2010.