Fritz Lang was always fascinated by themes of guilt, crime and punishment, meted out by the system and inflicted from within. The best example is his 1931 German masterpiece M . After he fled Nazi Germany for Hollywood, he kept at it, in films like Fury, starring Spencer Tracy, and 1945's The Woman in the Window, with Edward G. Robinson, freshly available on Blu-ray from Kink Lorber. Robinson, who also starred in Lang's similarly-themed Scarlet Street, plays a meek psychology professor who finds himself mixed up up with a dame (Joan Bennett), a murder, and his good friend, the district attorney (Raymond Massey). Lang was a master of psychological noir, the kind you feel in your bones. Stealing the show is Dan Duryea, one of classic Hollywood's great heavies, as a sneering weasel of a blackmailer on the make. Few character actors better captured the banality (and the filmic fun) of evil.
