THE BEDROOM WINDOW
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: In the best film thriller I have seen in a while, Steve Guttenberg pretends to have witnessed a crime his paramour actually saw. Before long, he is swept into an ever-worsening vortex of trouble and danger.
I recently gave a fairly negative review to an attempted nightmarish thriller, THE HITCHER. The plot of that is one of a teenager driving cross-country who picks up a psychotic hitchhiker and spends the rest of the movie fighting this creep who always does just the right thing, who has super-human strength, and who apparently has the ability to cloud the minds of officers of the law. Several people commented that they found it a very tense film and one asked me what more I wanted from a thriller. I just saw a film that has some superficial similarities to THE HITCHER but does just about everything right that I thought THE HITCHER did wrong. The film is THE BEDROOM WINDOW and it does right nearly everything that I thought THE HITCHER did wrong.
Steve Guttenberg plays a young executive at a Baltimore construction company who has a short affair with his boss's wife. From his bedroom window she witnesses an assault on a woman on the street below. Leter that evening another woman is murdered nearby. Sylvia, the boss's wife, cannot report what she saw to the police without her husband finding out about the affair so she describes the assailant to Guttenberg and he tells the police that it was he who saw the crime. This begins a chain of events that start out simply inconvenient for Guttenberg but get worse and worse, eventually achieving truly nightmarish proportions.
THE BEDROOM WINDOW, unlike THE HITCHER, has genuine characters with motivation and personalities. The killer, when finally discovered, is far more exciting as a character than is Rutger Hauer in THE HITCHER because he is real and makes mistakes. Guttenberg's desperation is also effective and believable because, while he rarely does the smartest thing he could do, the character always has good reasons for what he does. As a side note, the action of the film takes Guttenberg to the fells Point Saloon, which might well be a tip of the hat to Guttenberg's first major role in DINER. That film took place at the Fells Point Diner.
THE BEDROOM WINDOW has characters the audience cares about getting into believable messes. I rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper
mtgzz!leeper@rutgers.rutgers.edu
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