Window, The

At just 73 minutes, The Window is a fantastic little noir/thriller, wonderfully shot and directed. It is a model of how lean and economical a film might be, while still feeling like it packs a lot in. It doesn't take long to establish the set-up, there's good character work, and it becomes very tense and thrilling in the final act (not to mention rather dark and shocking in a couple of moments). Great performance by young Bobby Driscoll in the central role, a natural child actor (he won a special juvenile Oscar), with good support from Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale as his parents, and Paul Stewart (appropriately menacing) and Ruth Roman as the killers. And if the premise sounds familiar - someone witnessing a murder in an apartment building in NYC during a sweltering summer - it should come as little surprise to learn that it was adapted from a short story by Cornell Woolrich, who also wrote the story later adapted as Rear Window. The greatest compliment I can pay this film is that Hitchcock himself would surely have been proud to have numbered it among his own.