SUNDAY, 27 JULY 2025

I’m going to look at the endings of three movies from the ‘classic’ period of Hollywood: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), and Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946). I must start with a spoiler alert. I can’t discuss the endings of these films without giving away information about what happens in them, so anyone who hasn’t seen them might not want to read on. (I recommend watching them to anyone who hasn’t already seen them because I think they’re great films, but I have to warn that they’re black-and-white, which I know can be a turn-off for some people.) Because they are well-known, instead of providing a breakdown of each movie, which would make this blog even longer, I will assume that the reader is familiar enough with them that I don’t need to do the usual thing of listing all the characters or summarising the plot in every detail. This information can always be found on Wikipedia or IMDb if desired.

Two of these films are included in the film noir canon of most critics, while the third, Psycho, contains many features which would be recognised as characteristic of noir. All three were made by directors who are generally agreed to be among the best in Hollywood history. However, all three have endings which have sometimes been dismissed as unsatisfactory or downright lame, preventing them from being included in the top films of their time. I intend to focus on these final scenes: are they really as weak as some people contend, or are they much more nuanced than their detractors give them credit for? After all, these directors certainly knew how to make a good film so why would they suddenly come up with endings which seem so poor?

I want to add that I have done no structured research into how critics have previously interpreted these endings. If this were an academic paper, of course, I’d be required to do my homework, but in this case I’m simply stating my personal reaction to them and speculating on why these directors made the decisions they did. I’m sure many of my thoughts will repeat what has already been said about them elsewhere, so I apologise to anyone who has published similar ideas before me.

Psycho

This is one of the most analysed films in history, especially the famous shower scene. Hitchcock certainly takes risks in this movie, most notably by killing off the heroine halfway through, a decision which divides the movie into two, as the narrative abruptly changes from Marion’s story to the hunting down of Norman Bates.

At the end of the movie, when the main action is over, he takes another risk. The film finishes with a coda in which a psychiatrist rather dryly explains why Bates committed the murders, followed by shots of the latter in his prison cell, having become detached from reality and mentally taken over by his mother, as we hear his thoughts aloud in a voiceover.

To what extent are we meant to take seriously the psychiatrist’s explanation of Bates? Is Hitchcock making fun of the shrink as he confidently explains away human evil, or are we meant to believe what many people would now dismiss as his psychoanalytical mumbo-jumbo? The psychiatrist certainly seems rather pompous and self-important to modern eyes, but is our impression of him due to a societal move away from psychological to chemical and neurological explanations for human behaviour, while psychiatry and psychotherapy had a much higher reputation when Psycho was made, particularly in the United States? We have to put ourselves in the mindset of the post-war period when Freudianism was often central to the treatment of mental illness and had a lot of traction among intellectual circles in the broader society, and we know that Hitchcock was certainly interested in its ideas, as is shown by other works such as Vertigo, Marnie and Spellbound.

The final scene where we listen to the thoughts of Bates in his prison cell seems to reinforce what the psychiatrist says – Bates’ ego has disintegrated and he has been taken over by the superego of his mother – so the evidence leans towards the opinion that Hitchcock genuinely intended these words to explain what lay at the roots of the young man’s murder of Marion. Even so, I personally tend to the opinion that Hitchcock was riding both horses at the same time: he was certainly shrewd enough as a person and talented enough as an artist to do this. There are other occasions in his films when he recognises the expertise of a specialist in their field while also gently making fun of them: for example, the tweedy ornithologist in The Birds. It is only when we are analysing that we are expected to categorically opt for either A or B; when creating Art, the opposite is true and the more ambiguity that exists, usually the better.

We must also consider that the Production Code still existed at the time even if it had grown less keen to impose its diktats. Evil had to be punished. In most movies this was achieved by the simple expedient of killing off the villain in the final scene: the wages of sin was almost always death. But if we imagine Psycho ending with a dead Norman Bates and then perhaps a scene at the cemetery where Marion’s sister and her boyfriend throw flowers on her grave, this would seem disappointingly low-key and the movie would be weaker. We must also consider the audience of the time. The scene of the psychiatrist and Bates in his cell would have offered them an explanation for the latter’s dressing up as his mother when he killed, which many of them might otherwise have seen as rather far-fetched, while Bates still gets his just deserts by his descent into psychosis. And the final scene in the film as the credits roll, in which the car is being raised to the surface of the lake where Bates had submerged it, is a perfect symbol for the unconscious being dragged up from the depths into daylight, and fits the content of the movie supremely well.

The Woman in the Window    

This was the first of a pair of movies Lang directed in the mid-1940s, with the same trio of actors at its centre – Edward G Robinson, Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea – and a similar theme of a respectable, establishment man becoming embroiled in crime and murder because of a chance encounter with a beautiful young woman. I have included it in this blog because the ending has so often been criticised, and even ridiculed, since the protagonist, having committed one murder and unsuccessfully tried to assist a second, kills himself by swallowing poison as he sits in his chair, only to wake up in the same chair to find out it was a dream.

At first this seems like the kind of ending an unusually dull pupil might make in an assigned essay in English class. It certainly shocked me the first time I saw the movie and spoiled some of the pleasure I’d felt while watching it. But each time I’ve seen it since, I’ve found it much less jarring. This may simply be that I now know it is coming and I see the rest of the film in a different light because of that knowledge, but I’ve become certain that its ending was quite deliberate and Lang was not being slapdash or lazy.

In the second movie of his pair, Scarlet Street, released one year later, Lang solved the problem of punishing the protagonist who had committed murder by showing him as a bum who tried to commit suicide and failed, and who then mentally cracked and lived on park benches in an alcoholic stupor, and occasionally went to the police to confess his crime but wasn’t believed. This made for a truly bleak ending, far worse in my opinion than simply killing him off.

So why didn’t Lang set up a similar fate for his protagonist in The Woman in the Window? He was an immensely talented director with a long history of making groundbreaking films, so the it-was-all-a-dream ending must surely have been intentional. My feeling is that he enjoyed stringing us along, teasing us to read this movie as a noirish descent into chaos and murder, while it was actually a psychological exploration of the inner life of its protagonist, Professor Richard Wanley, and not a narrative told from an objective, third-person perspective as is the case in Scarlet Street.

The opening scenes spell this out quite clearly. The first shows Wanley delivering a university lecture talking about the Biblical injunction of ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, comparing murder for personal gain with murder in self-defence, followed by a scene when he waves goodbye to his wife and children as they set out on a vacation where he can’t join them due to the pressures of work. But the key scene is the third one, where he and his friends – three well-connected middle-aged establishment figures – sit in a sort of gentleman’s club and joke about themselves as ‘three old crocs’. The other two men are jovial and light-hearted, but Wanley speaks with more passion, saying that he hates the ‘stodginess’ that has taken over his life. The rest of the movie becomes the buried dream of this stodgy man with his secret longing for adventure. In a much less destructive way than Psycho, this movie is also about repressed and disruptive subconscious longings rising to the surface.

This imbues it with a different tone from the camera-as-neutral-observer approach of Scarlet Street. Everything in The Woman in the Window happens through the eyes of Wanley. The other characters are painted in bold, almost stereotypical brushstrokes, so we know little about their inner life and motivation. This is particularly true of the young woman played by Joan Bennett, who displays a brash confidence on the surface but is essentially rather passive and a decent, ordinary human being, not at all the selfish slattern of Scarlet Street. Crucially, a great deal of the film is taken up with the efforts of Wanley to hide his guilt from a member of his middle-aged coterie who is the District Attorney, but he constantly gives himself away through careless mistakes (both an astute piece of psychology on the part of Lang of how guilt often unconsciously pushes us to reveal our secrets even as we try to hide them, and an expression of the split in Wanley between his id and superego.) There is a focus on clues such as tyre tracks and threads from torn jackets and random witnesses who might prove Wanley’s guilt, which gives the film elements of the police procedural, reminiscent in some ways of parts of his earlier German film, M. This focus on evidence and clues as Wanley unwittingly betrays himself makes it an intriguing and nervy watch rather than setting off the more uncomfortable feelings of Scarlet Street, in which we see a decent man being cheated and humiliated, and ultimately destroyed, by a pair of lowlife chancers.

After watching The Woman in the Window for the first time, it is easy to raise an eyebrow and wearily say, ‘It was all a dream? Come on, I could do better than that!’. But when we look at the ending more carefully, I think Lang has a twinkle in his eye for the way he has led us down the garden path. As Wanley stumbles out of the building, still groggy, he recognises the people he meets on the way (the hat-check clerk, a taxi driver) as characters in his dream, reminiscent of the last scene in The Wizard of Oz, which had come out just a few years before, and perhaps astute viewers of the time would have spotted the sly reference. And just to spell out even more clearly that what had seemed like a dark thriller was ending more like a screwball comedy, the last shot is of Wanley running away as a woman approaches him and asks him for a light and the events of his dream seem to be starting all over again.

I’m unusual in the sense that I will watch a movie time and time again if I like it enough (although I’m not a patch on Myra Franklin, who, by 2015, had seen The Sound of Music 840 times. The only way I could bear it even once would be at a drag queen convention where everyone dressed up as nuns and sang along with the songs. Hell, I even hate the songs. With exceptions, of course, Mr Coltrane.) But most people don’t take this approach to a film; when they’ve seen it, they want to move on to another.

I feel our reaction to the ending of The Woman in the Window depends on whether we are watching the movie for the first time for entertainment, or approaching it more critically as we watch it again and think more deeply about the way it has been constructed. I would suggest that framing the action as a dream was a deliberate choice on Lang’s part that probably fails with many of its audience, but improves the film as a work of art, turning it from a dark and intriguing police procedural into a glance into the soul of a middle-aged bourgeois man which is sympathetic and good-humoured and ultimately even tinged with comedy.

Gilda

For most of this psychologically complex movie, which mixes strong intimations of bisexuality in its two main male characters, vicious misogyny towards women on their part, and the close relationship that exists between passionate love and equally passionate loathing, Gilda and Johnny do their best to torture each other emotionally. They had once been lovers, but Gilda is now married to the Nazi businessman, Ballin, who employs Johnny as his gofer and, we are led to assume, his sometimes lover. It is a viper’s nest of malice and intrigue, and yet suddenly in the final scene, Ballin is killed and Gilda and Johnny are heading off into the sunset like a happy heterosexual couple in a romantic comedy. With its layers of sexual indeterminacy and its heteronormative ending, it is hardly surprising that the film has become a favourite of queer studies.

We must remember here the strictures of the Production Code, especially in the year 1946 when the movie was released. Even the boneheads who operated the Code must have sensed something untoward in this film. The only way this could slip under the radar and get accepted despite its content being buried under thickets of subtext was to make sure the final moral message was uplifting and totally conventional. In this web of venomous spiders, the most venomous of all (the Nazi, Ballin) had to meet his doom, while the heterosexual couple are saved because they see the error of their ways and, in spite of what we have witnessed of their capacity for cruelty and spite, they are therefore, as heterosexuals, still capable of redemption.

It is hard not to see the ending as outrageous irony on Vidor’s part, a sop to the audience who wanted Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford, the famous heart-throb actors who played the two main characters, to overcome all and find true love. The movie as a whole is drenched in irony, provided mainly by a character, Uncle Pio, who is a hired hand at the nightclub and serves as a kind of chorus commenting on events and putting Johnny in his place by pointing out that he, too, is ultimately just a hired hand. There is also a world-weary detective who is trying to collect evidence against Ballin and whose presence adds to the feeling of cynicism which pervades the movie, but who transforms into something of a romantic at the very end (shades of Captain Renault in Casablanca).

There is a perfunctory quality to the final scene which begins with Gilda and Johnny finally downing weapons and admitting their love for each other, on which Ballin unexpectedly reappears, only to be killed by Uncle Pio. Then the detective suddenly arrives. He makes it clear that Uncle Pio will face no charges and that Gilda and Johnny are free to leave. All of this happens very quickly, as if there were only one day left for shooting and something had to be in the can. The problem isn’t really the rather clumsy and convenient plotting, though. Yes, characters have to turn up at exactly the right moment, but audiences accept this kind of thing all the time if they are swept along by the story. The problem is psychological: after all the hatred they have shown for each other and their twisted mix of convoluted emotions, it turns out that the truth was simply that they loved each other deep down.

Having said this, it’s hard to imagine any kind of ending which would have satisfied the expectations that the film sets up in its striking opening minutes and keeps sizzling in the background throughout. But the cloudiness of motivation of both Gilda and Johnny, which makes the film so fascinating as we watch it, becomes a negative weighing it down as it draws towards resolution. Hayworth is stunning as Gilda, but largely as an object for the male gaze, and we never really have much idea what lies behind that astounding beauty. She doesn’t seem motivated by whatever is most advantageous to her like Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past, nor to be as greedy and calculating as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity. She’s a beautiful blank page rather than a femme fatale. Similarly, there is an ambiguous quality to Johnny’s cruelty towards her. Is he jealous because Ballin owns her as her husband and he wants her for himself, or is he jealous of her because of his feelings for Ballin? These questions don’t have to be answered, indeed probably shouldn’t be answered if we want to sustain the movie’s emotional complexity, but the ‘love conquers all’ ending clashes with them too much to ring true.

Therefore, of the three movies I’ve chosen for this blog, I find the ending of this film the least satisfying. For me, it doesn’t just spoil the last few minutes but undermines the movie as a whole. I’m pretty sure that Vidor intended it to be read ironically, at least by viewers who had picked up the sexual subtext, but I don’t think he pulls it off. Or maybe he was just constrained in what he could do, either by the studio or the Code, so this ending was put there to satisfy both audiences and censors, and the reality is as simple as that. But it leaves people like me who are not convinced by this sudden transformation unable to do anything other than give a cynical grin as we watch them walk off into the sunset, feeling sure that, if they do get married, they’ll be at each other’s throats again by the time the honeymoon begins.

 Conclusion

When I originally chose these three movies for discussion, the most important reason (other than I liked them a lot) was the fact I had read many people trash their final scenes. Having written my essay, I see that the three movies share something else: the idea of unconscious thoughts and feelings erupting into consciousness. In the case of Psycho, this is openly explored, with the psychological reasons for Norman Bates’ murderous violence. The Woman in the Window is more subtle and more gentle, as we temporarily glance behind the hidden desires of a successful middle-aged man that are brought to the surface for a moment and then sublimated once more. Finally, Gilda is the least theorised, merely showing the maelstrom of feelings that motivate its characters, of which they themselves sometimes seem only vaguely aware, if at all. In their own way all three films are subtle in how they handle their extreme content, partly due to the skill of their directors and probably in part due to the existence of the censor. In current films everything tends to be much more explicit, but I’m not sure this is an advance in terms of their quality as serious Art.