In The Woman in the Window, Edward G. Robinson plays a professor of psychology.
Robinson portrays Professor Richard Wanley, a respectable middle-aged academic whose orderly life collapses after he becomes fascinated by a portrait in a shop window. The professor’s expertise is important to the film’s setup: he is an educated, apparently rational man drawn into a dangerous situation involving Alice Reed and her lover.
The 1944 film was directed by Fritz Lang and adapted from J. H. Wallis’s novel Once Off Guard. It is a classic film noir built around temptation, guilt, mistaken identity, and the fear that a single impulsive act can destroy a carefully constructed life. Robinson’s character is not a police psychologist or psychiatrist; he is specifically a college psychology professor.
A nearby point often confused with the answer is the film’s dreamlike ending. Wanley appears to face murder, exposure, and suicide, but the final revelation reframes the entire ordeal as a dream. Robinson and Joan Bennett later reunited with Lang for Scarlet Street (1945), another noir involving a morally compromised ordinary man.