TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 and 10 a.m. ET is The Window (1949), Starring Bobby Driscoll, Arthur Kennedy, Barbara Hale, Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman; Plus, Memories of a Banned, Oscar-Winning Masterpiece, Walt Disney’s Song of the South (1946), which black supremacists have decreed that Nobody May See

 

 

By David in TN
Friday, April 22, 2022 at 11:20:00 P.M. EDT

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 and 10 a.m. ET is The Window (1949). It’s another recycled film, previously shown on Noir Alley in November 2017. In The Window, Bobby Driscoll played a modern version of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” He’s a young boy who likes to tell stories he made up. One night, sleeping outside in the summer heat, he sees an actual murder. When he tries to tell people, they don't believe him.

Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale are the boy’s parents. Ruth Roman and Paul Stewart are the sinister couple living on the floor above who killed a seaman, whom they were attempting to rob.

The film shows the condition of tenement dwellers among the New York City working class of the time.

Our friend Eddie Muller had a good introduction to The Window. He credited Arthur Kennedy with being one of the best actors of all time (“Always hit the right note”). Eddie says one of his all-time favorite actors is “raspy-voiced Paul Stewart as the menacing Mr. Kellerson, (who) is husband and pimp for the slumming Ruth Roman.” (Stewart was ubiquitous, but may be best remembered for playing the greedy butler in Citizen Kane.) Mrs. Kellerson has lured a sailor back to their apartment. After apparently drugging him, she lifts the money from the sailor’s wallet, whereupon he wakes up and the Kellersons kill him and hide the body. Which Tommy, played by Bobby Driscoll, sees while sleeping outside their window. Contrary to popular belief, The Naked City (1948) was not the first movie filmed on location in Manhattan, The Window was in 1947. Although The Window is supposed to be in the summer, it was filmed in the winter. Eddie Muller reports that RKO boss Howard Hughes hated “kid” movies and only released it in 1949 out of desperation, only to have it be a big hit. The Naked City was the first major film police procedural. The irony is, it’s supposed to be the “Dark Side,” but 1948 Manhattan looks rather civilized, compared to a good many cities today.

Bobby Driscoll was a child actor whose career dried up as he got older, eventually turning to drugs. In 1968, age 31, he was found dead in an abandoned New York City tenement building, similar to the one in this film. He was buried, unidentified, in Potter’s Field.
 

Driscoll in 1961, looking a bit like Montgomery Clift, another ill-fated, Hollywood drug addict.
 

Driscoll’s other “Big” role was in Song of the South (1946). I wrote earlier that I saw it when 8-9 years old. Actually I was just short of seven. I found Song of the South was re-released late in 1956. I saw it in the spring of 1957.

It was (I believe) a Sunday afternoon. There was a big crowd lined up at the ticket windows. I say “windows,” because at the time, blacks had a separate ticket window from whites. There was a huge number of blacks, whole families, there to see it. They sat in the balcony.

The big scene for me was Bobby Driscoll run down and gored by a bull. It gave me nightmares.

Song of the South was released to theaters yet again in 1972 with no protests. And a couple of times a few years later, on VHS in the 1980s, then banned.

The author Joel Chandler Harris was a racial liberal for the time. The story is set after slavery has been abolished. Uncle Remus is a paid worker on the plantation, and is free to leave it whenever he wants to. Uncle Remus is also the most sensible adult in the picture.

N.S.: For over 100 years, Harris’ Uncle Remus stories were among the most popular literature in America, with one generation of parents after another reading them aloud to their children. (It sounds like the Uncle Remus stories also had a major influence on the Amos n’ Andy radio and TV series, which were also equally beloved by blacks and whites, in which James Baskett performed (the radio series) and which was also banned on the say-so of black supremacists.

Song of the South won one competitive Oscar, for Best Original Song (“Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,”). It was also nominated for best music, scoring of a musical picture. Its star, James Baskett, was awarded a special honorary Oscar at the 1948 Oscar presentation. Someone must have told the Academy’s Oscar Committee that Baskett was dying of heart disease and diabetes, and so, in a grand, public gesture, the Academy made a point of awarding him his special Oscar shortly before he would die of heart failure at the age of 44.

(The foregoing is my interpretation. Basskett’s bio page at imdb.com notes that he was desperately ill while making Song of the South, and suffered a heart attack in December 1946, shortly after the film’s release. However, the same entry asserts “After Baskett died unexpectedly in 1948…,” which beggars belief.)

“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” (Original)