Girl in the Window (1961) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Allison M. 🌱 ★★½

  /I hate how disposable and “rentable” women are in this film.

• Review by Ty 4

  This movie is absolutely brilliant. Mystified by both it and Domenica D'Agosto. People of Letterboxd, all 20 of my followers on here, please watch the films of Luciano Emmer, how are they so underrated and unapprecaited is beyond me.

• Review by Zoë 🐛 ★★★

  I kinda like Girl in the Window's unconventional approach to neorealism. The first act of the film, which takes place in a mining community in Holland, following several Italian miners, but in particular Federico and Vincenzo, on a dramatic day where an accident occurs and they are stuck underground for at least a dozen hours before rescue, is both extremely well done and very much what one would expect from an Italian neorealist perspective on a story of miners. The story then shifts to Federico and Vincenzo (Lino Ventura and Bernard Fresson) going through with their decision made underground that they will go to the red light district in Amsterdam and pay two sex workers to spend the weekend with…

• Review by Campbell George ★★★ 4

  Starting to accept that Italian Neorealism is my personal Lucy holding the football

• Review by Tyler Plunkett ★★★★½

  Found this while perusing the Criterion Channel and figured it’d be nice to throw on a movie I’d never heard of (although it turns out it was on my watchlist, so I guess I had come across it at some point). A stroke of divine intervention perhaps, as that’s not something I ever do and this could not have been more aligned with my interests. It begins with an exquisitely terse twenty minutes in a mineshaft and then briskly transitions into a man-falls-in-love-with-prostitute story. Well-trodden ground though that may be, Emmer sidesteps any overt moralism in pursuit of an open, naturalistic cinema. The characters and their situations remain mostly undefined beyond their occupations—miners and hookers—and an Italo-Dutch language barrier limits…

• Review by MplsMatt 2

  I'm not trying to say this is a major work or anything - but this seems woefully underseen. Fantastic cast, gorgeously shot by Otello Martelli (La Dolce Vita, La Strada, Bitter Rice, Paisan, etc), and has a frank neorealist take on both migrant coal miners as well as sex work. Where else will you see Lino Ventura make an ass of himself in a Dutch gay bar? I'm not sure if I need to pursue Luciano Emmer's complete filmography but Sunday in August looks very promising as well.

• Review by Torsten Matschiess 🌵 ★★★½

• Review by Jeremiah ★★★★

  Neorealism, Pasolini Style, which is to say miserable and brutish but charged with an almost religious integrity, a longing for an unfallen world. But Pasolini didn't direct this, and was only one of several writers, so it doesn't have his Rodinian rough edges, his penchant for real filth. Instead it's a lovely bridge between the two neorealist epochs, the ages of De Sica and of Rosi. Special notice for Lino Ventura treating a gay bar like a bull treats a china shop.

• Review by zabby 4

  Italian workers come to Holland to make money working in the coal mines. One of the new recruits, Vincenzo (Bernard Fresson), is caught in a mine cave-in and makes a pact with Federico (Lino Ventura) that they'll go to Amsterdam if they are rescued. The plan is to go to the red light district and hire some girls to go with them to the country for the weekend. Federico hooks up with Chanel (Magali Noël) and Vincenzo, after a rocky start, starts a tentative romance with Else (Marina Vlady). The Dutch-Italian language divide is a constant barrier to communication and leads to many misunderstandings.

  Directed by Luciano Emmer. The film starts with a detailed sequence showing what it's like to…

• Review by Craig J. Clark ★★★½

  "Northern women aren't like Italian women. You need to be kinder."

  There's a scene exactly halfway through this film where veteran miner Lino Ventura, determined to show newbie Bernard Fresson a good time in Amsterdam after they survive a cave-in on Fresson's first day on the job, unknowingly wanders into a gay bar in the red light district to scare up some female companionshop and takes a couple of minutes to figure out why he isn't having any luck. (Considering he's a red-blooded Italian, Ventura's reaction when the penny drops is understandable.) What's significant about this is it happens in a film that came out a whole year before Otto Preminger's Advise & Consent, which made a big deal out of…

• Review by Christopher Small

  What a discovery! Feels like as drastic a reformilation of style by Emmer as The Hole did for Jacques Becker. The superb mining sequences dovetail surprisingly well with the sedate rhythms of life in the streets of Amsterdam’s red light district. You can see that Emmer is naturally suspicious of the über-macho Lino Ventura character, and uses the startling mid-point shift to strip away the layers of braggadocio and bravado that at first pass seemed so charming. But it is all so gentle, the transitions between scenes so graceful, and the manoeuvres within them so gloriously elegant. Great bar scenes. Such a sexy movie!

• Review by Jake Savage ★★½

  There's a reason why many of Pasolini's early screenwriting credits have remained buried underneath the chaotic and brilliant directorial career that followed. He's given a co-author credit for the screenplay here, alongside the film's director, and a collection of forgotten Italians who worked on everything from sub-MST3K Hercules movies to La notte. As it is, it's hard to find fault in the film for not being "transgressive" enough. Apparently it went through severe censorship, inspiring director Luciano Emmer to make the jump to television.

  Nothing more than a footnote in his career, there are still some shadows of Pasolini's presence here. Our protagonists, Vincenzo and Federico, are miners, and the film abruptly starts with them caved in, and on the…