Oh, Windows.

Gordon Willis defined the way we saw movies in the 70s with his work on the Woody Allen films and The Godfather trilogy. But he never directed, other than this movie. Vincent Carnaby said of it, “…everything about Windows is ridiculous; including the performances of Talia Shire and Elizabeth Ashley; it has remarkably little pace of any kind, partly because anything of any interest happens off-screen and what happens off-screen is consistently, nuttily irrelevant; the camera-work, which Mr. Willis did for himself, is technically O.K.”

I mean, he sold it to me with that.

But oh, there are problems. One is, well, the homophobia. David Denby of The New Yorker said, “Windows exists only in the perverted fantasies of men who hate lesbians so much they will concoct any idiocy in order to slander them.”

Emily Hollander (Talia Shire) is all her neighbor Andrea Glassen (Elizabeth Ashley) thinks about. Emily is also attacked by a man who doesn’t have sex with her. He just wants her to beg for mercy into a tape recorder; he does it again, but Andrea saves her. Of course, Andrea has set the whole thing up and thinks that eventually, Emily will come to love her.

This came out a month before Cruising, so 1980 was a banner year for representation, huh?

This looks nice, though.