The Bedroom Window (1987) - film review

Executive Terry Lambert soon begins to regret having an affair with his boss’s wife, Sylvia.  One night, Sylvia witnesses an attempted rape through the bedroom window of Terry’s apartment.  Terry misses seeing the attack but is keen to inform the authorities when he learns of similar incidents in the area.  As Sylvia is concerned about keeping her affair from her husband, Terry decides to pretend it was he who witnessed the attack.  The scheme soon backfires and Terry finds himself being suspected of being the aggressor.  His only hope is to find the rapist and expose him...

Beginning as a fairly respectable homage to film noir and Hitchcock, this lightweight American thriller soon becomes weighed down by its own pretensions and ends up as a rather muddled mishmash of genres.  In the first half, which builds the suspense and noirish atmosphere very competently, it is possible to overlook the film’s faults – implausible characterisation, phoney dialogue, and an uneven narrative style.  This is not so in the second half, where the plot becomes increasingly less credible, and ends up veering all over the place like, a juggernaut out of control.  The film ultimately resembles a weak, disrespectful parody of the genre it begins by emulating so promisingly.

What just about saves the film and prevents it from appearing totally amateurish is its relatively talented star actors who, whilst appearing miscast and clearly better than the material they are saddled with, turn in some entertaining performances.  Steve Guttenberg makes an improbable hero (with more sex appeal than brains), assisted by a gutsy tongue-in-cheek Elizabeth McGovern.   French beauty Isabelle Huppert brings a touch of class to the film’s first half, even if the character she is playing (a self-centred femme fatale type) is just too mean and cold to be taken seriously.

© James Travers 2003

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