Karina: Interior living room. Joan Bennett Holmby Hills mansion, night. There is a fire in the fireplace, Joan and Walter sit before the fire face to face. Walter is studying her, somberly. 

Walter Wanger [Reenactment]: "The color of your hair."

Karina: Joan's hand floats up to finger her bleached blonde waves. 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "Oh, no. You want to make me look like her because you think she looks like me?" 

Walter Wanger [Reenactment]: "Joan please. It can't matter to you." 

Karina: She shrinks a little defeated, but then the gears begin to turn in her head. She turns, catches her reflection in the window and begins to see herself transform. 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "All right, I'll do it." 

Karina: Music swells, romantic, mysterious. Joan and Walter embrace clenching with a kiss; their pact to change her hair and change her life.

What you just heard is based on a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film, "Vertigo." Arguably the peak of the genre that would come to be known as film noir. In "Vertigo," Jimmy Stewart falls in love with an icy blonde played by Kim Novak. When he believes he sees that woman die, he tries to make over a brunette, also played by Kim Novak, into the blonde he believes he lost. We rewrote a scene from "Vertigo" to imagine a version of its central psychosexual make-over centered on Walter Wanger transforming his wife, Joan Bennett into a facsimile of Hedy Lamarr, a brunette actress with whom Walter had very recently worked.

That really happened. And Joan Bennet's change of hair color would become no joke - one of the most pivotal moments of her career. In changing her hair, Walter Wanger turned Joan Bennett into a different person; at least as far as the movie going public was concerned. But whereas in "Vertigo," the obsessed man puts a pathetic woman through a transformation in order to deplete her actual identity, Wanger's transformation of Bennett was additive. It helped her come into her own as a star with a unique persona. As a brunette, Joan played women on the run, women with agency, women in the center of exciting times. During World War II, she starred in five films that explicitly addressed the Nazi threat. By my count, more than any other single prominent Hollywood actress. While her platinum blonde tresses had been in sync with the culture when she first arrived in Hollywood in the late 1920s, now her new, more natural look allowed her to function as an avatar for American women making war time, sacrifices and, eschewing luxuries like hair bleach. Finally, her smoldering, raven - haired look would make her the perfect star to help kick off a wave of movies dealing with the existential fallout of the post-war era. 

Vanessa: My grandfather, Walter, created a fantasy version of raven - haired Joan, which came to shape the audience's perception of her as the quintessential dangerous, sexually alluring bad girl, and then Walter's shooting incident would turn my grandmother Joan into the femme fatale of their real life film noir. I'm Vanessa Hope 

Karina: and I'm Karina Longworth. We'll discuss all that and more in part two of Love is a Crime

Ronald Davis: You asked about 'Trade Winds' because I believe that's where you - your hair went dark,

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: Went dark...

Ronald Davis: Uh huh. Whose decision was that?

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: Well, what is that the one where I thought I'd committed a murder or something and went into a disguise,

Ronald Davis: Maybe

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: Well that's when I put the dark wig on and everyone said I look like Hedy Lamarr 

Ronald Davis: Yeah, I was gonna say...

Karina: When last we left Joan and Walter, their personal and professional relationships were both at an impasse. Joan left Los Angeles to join a touring production of "Stage Door" and Wanger produced a film called, "Algiers" through which a beautiful woman named Hedy Lamarr would make her Hollywood debut. Hedy Lamarr has become something of a revived icon in recent years, a recent documentary and an upcoming limited series, starring Gal Gadot, deal with Hedy's unusual for her time hobby. She was a bedroom inventor who amongst other things, worked with composer, George Antheil on a technology to allow radio-controlled torpedoes to hop between frequencies. Antheil and Lamarr offered their work to the allies who they thought could use it to evade the access as attempts to jam their torpedoes. But the war department didn't take Hedy seriously, and her input remained unused and unacknowledged for decades. 

Vanessa: Hedy was most famous for being beautiful and that tended to eclipse all of her other accomplishments. So the story that people today are happy to tell is that her invention actually led to the development of Bluetooth and wireless technologies, but in her day Hedy was struggling to be appreciated for anything other than her looks.

Karina: Hedy's debut Hollywood film "Algiers" set the template for a certain genre of romantic, exotic adventure film that would be popular for decades hitting its peak with "Casa Blanca." It helped to enshrine Walter Wanger as one of the most successful producers of all time and soon he'd be elected president of the Motion Picture Academy and produce several classics, such as John Ford's "Stagecoach" and Alfred Hitchcock's "Foreign Correspondent," as well as lots of hits including several films starring Joan. When Joan returned from performing "Stage Door" on the road, Wanger presented her with a script for a film called, "Trade Winds," in which Joan would play a suspected murderess on the lam who ends up sailing around the world with an amaris detective on her trail. To cloak her identity the lady fugitive dyes her hair from blonde to brown. 

Actress : "There you are. That's lovely. Just under two hours." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "It is lovely. What an improvement.

Karina: Wanger decided that the brunette version of the character should be modeled after the woman at the center of his last success; the then current top icon of globe trotting, brunette allure, Hedy Lamarr. Joan was given a black wig in the style of Hedy's hair in "Algiers," severely parted down the middle, and fluting out to a face framing, halo of dark curls. And Joan changed her speaking voice, not to approximate Hedy's Austrian accent, but to reach a lower register, emphasizing sultriness. Both "Algiers" and "Trade Winds" were major hits and the ascendancy of Hedy Lamarr as a new star only helped Joan's star power grow now that they were doubles for one another. But how did it make Joan feel to have her lover of several years openly transform her into the double of a woman he had just met.

Vanessa: If it were me, I would have been jealous. I would have been upset or threatened because of course, there's this other beautiful woman and Walter's trying to pygmalion me and style me after her, but Joan wasn't threatened and she felt so lucky that this transformation changed her career and for the better that I think she just found it flattering that in dimly lit restaurants, she would be addressed as Ms. Lamarr, but she jokes that she doesn't think Hedy Lamarr took it so lightly. No matter who Walter turned Joan into for whatever role, the truth about Joan is that she didn't take herself or her persona seriously at all. So she might be playing the femme fatale but she wouldn't see herself that way. She made light of her fame and often felt unworthy of it, like a lot of actors. I think she took the idea of celebrity with a sense of humor and a grain of salt. 

Karina: Ironically in 1939, shortly after her Hollywood debut, Hedy Lamarr married Joan's recent ex-husband Gene Markey. The following year, Walter would finally propose to Joan over the phone and on January 12th, 1940, Joan and Walter eloped in Arizona. Markey and Walter were both Dartmouth alumns as was producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., who from 1936 to 1942 was married to yet another gorgeous brunette star, Myrna Loy. In the 1930s and forties, Gene, Walter, and Arthur all socialized together with their wives of the moment in tow. In 1946, 5 years after his divorce from Hedy, Gene would marry Myrna Loy, all involved in this somewhat incestuous marriage circle seem to be remarkably chill about it. At one point in the forties, Hornblow's soon to be wife, Leonora, ran into Markey and Loy at a nightclub and reported back to Arthur that she and Gene had joked about how close the group was dancing to polygamy. "You can imagine the cozy family scene," she wrote, "Both Jean and I agreed that if all concerned and all of the people they had been married to married just once more, we could have a complete colony." 

Vanessa: I believe Joan was a friend to Hedy and Hollywood in general that, you know, she was new to the scene and Joan helped orient her and helped her adjust and gave her a husband.

Karina: It would take a few films for Joan's new raven - haired persona to fully settle, but the changes Wanger imposed to her look and vibe on "Trade Winds" would be for the better. Once a forgettable starlet, who one critic described as virtually indistinguishable from Carole Lombard, now Joan was at least as memorable as the movies she appeared in.

Vanessa: I think people thought she had a kind of sly funny streak and that none of her roles as a blonde really could capture that. So something in her jelled with a tougher, sexier, more worldly kind of character, and then she became more ambitious or the parts she was offered were more interesting. 

Karina: Joan's offscreen persona began to become more interesting too. In 1941, Joan was credited with writing an article in Modern Screen Magazine, titled "Mistakes My Daughters Will Never Make." In one winking line, Joan claimed that her daughter quote, "Will never make the mistake of changing the color of their hair," but much of it doesn't feel jokey at all. In fact, it's almost shockingly direct about the state of gender relations in 1941 

Vanessa: "Mistakes My Daughters Will Never Make. One. They will never make the mistake of letting men know they are independent." Wow. It's so Joan. I mean, she clearly understood the rules of patriarchy and how to play by them and not to upset them because you'll pay for it if your man feels emasculated or he feels you're too independent and self-sufficient, and he won't bother to support you or be reciprocal or any, you know, take care of any of the other duties that today men are expected to do parenting, but even then they weren't necessarily expected to. So they were really off the hook if they thought you were independent, and Joan was so she knew, she kind of had to pretend not to be, pretend to be a little dependent, a little submissive and subservient. 

Karina: Walter regularly went on location and left Joan at home in Los Angeles. He was confident that Joan was capable of fending for herself, and that confidence gave Joan some anxiety as is revealed in this statement, which Joan asked to be removed from the article before publication. 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "Well, he knows I have two youngsters, a house to run and a career, which add up to three rarely major careers for one poor, weak woman to handle. But he figured that if anything comes up, no matter what comes up, I can handle it. I don't say he isn't right. Mind you. I'm afraid he is, but being a woman, I'd like him to be anxious, worried. I'd like him to say distractedly 'No, no, I can't leave Joan alone. I wouldn't have an easy moment.' He doesn't say I think anything of the sort."

Vanessa: Well, it was 1941. It was the beginning of their marriage and she wanted it to feel reciprocal and mutual and peaceful. But I think unfortunately Walter took advantage of the fact that she could take care of herself and her career and her children and her house, and he left her alone a lot and went off and did his thing and got very preoccupied and caught up with his own career. You couldn't talk about balance then you couldn't just put it in an article and have a conversation about it. It had to be kept quiet.

Karina: Walter was in the midst of a great run of classic films, but a lot of them were expensive to make and lost money. He began shaving costs by disposing of his contracts with performers, and during this fire sale, he allowed his contract with Joan to lapse. This freed her up to make movies for producers other than her new husband. 

Vanessa: Joan signed a non-exclusive contract with 20th century Fox and Darryl Zanuck. And I think I understand that she didn't like being bound by contracts with major studios, but at least she could choose her properties and she could continue to develop this new brunette image after "Trade Winds." She was also then more financially secure, which I know she appreciated, and her career in her own hands went pretty well. Her next two films with Fox were anti-Nazi movies. 

Karina: In fact, Joan Bennett start in five explicitly anti-Nazi films between 1940 and 1943, more than any other American female star of her generation. It's particularly significant that two of these films were released before the US entered the war. When the topic of intervention in the European conflict was still considered to be controversial.

Vanessa: The big deal was to be in anti-Nazi movies before everyone else because again, many studios in Hollywood were focused on a German market, as opposed to telling the truth about the war and what was going on, or even reckoning with it. So Joan was brave and bold in being in these movies. 

Karina: Joan had signed with Fox because they were offering her a chance to choose her projects, a rare privilege for any actress at that time. But it's surprising that Fox would be the studio that would give any actress the freedom to make four anti-Nazi movies before 1944. In the year sent months immediately preceding Pearl Harbor, Warner Brothers took the firmest stance against the Nazi threat, pulling their films from circulation in Germany before anyone else and making the first explicitly anti-Nazi Hollywood film, "Confessions of a Nazi Spy," in 1939. MGM was the wishy-washiest studio in town, eagerly doing business with Nazi Germany until the Nazis cut them off. Fox fell somewhere in the middle. The studio's chief Darryl Zanuck began advocating for the US' entry into World War II at least a year before Pearl Harbor. And in January 1941, he joined the Signal Corps as a reservist. He rushed a bunch of patriotic pro war films into production. All of them ripped from the headlines, some of which he wrote himself under a pseudonym. Fox had stopped doing business with Germany by September 1940, shortly after they released Joan's first anti-Nazi film, "The Man I Married." 

Vanessa: In "The Man I Married" Joan plays a sophisticated New York magazine writer and editor and kind of steals the film. She has many great one-liners and is really feisty and yet very loving toward this husband who is German born and bringing her and their son back to Berlin to deal with his father's factory, and whether he's taking it over or selling it, and Joan becomes blindsided by his increasing nationalism. I think plenty of women are blindsided by a husband who becomes increasingly authoritarian. I think it's a nice wake-up call movie and Joan shows a ton of backbone. 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "We've been married 8 years and suddenly he seems a stranger standing there with his hand up like a mechanical doll screaming. I've seen men go mad at football games, but nothing like that. He looked as if he were going to pop. What I can't get through my head is why these people listen to Hitler when they know in the end it'll only mean bloodshed and chaos." 

Karina: "The Man I Married" makes the boldest anti-Nazi statement of any of Joan's movies, but it wasn't necessarily the most important to her career. Over her decade plus in Hollywood, to this point, Joan had thrived when working with strong charismatic directors. With George Cukor on "Little Women," Gregory La Cava on "Private Worlds" and Tay Garnett on "Trade Winds." shortly after signing with Fox, she would begin a partnership with the director with whom she'd create her best films. His name was Fritz Lang.

Fritz Lang was born in Austria in 1890, to a Catholic father and a Jewish mother who converted. Even though Fritz, his mother converted to Catholicism and he was raised in the Catholic church, his mother's lineage would burn a target into his back in Nazi, Germany. After he immigrated to Hollywood, Lang would be vocally anti-Nazi, even anti German, because it was the German people who followed Hitler's orders. But some believe he protested so strongly to obscure his own complicated past. From 1922, until he fled Europe in 1933, Lang was married to Thea von Harbou, an actress and screenwriter who collaborated with him on his most important pre Hollywood works, including "M," "Metropolis" and "Die Nibelungen." Most sources agree that Thea was a member of the Nazi party but Lang seems to have been mostly indifferent to the Nazis until very late in the game. And in hindsight, not protesting evil can be seen as tantamount to a supporting it, but something clearly shifted at some point. Several of Lang's European films were favorites of Hitler and Goebbels. "M," Lang's 1931 masterpiece starring Peter Lorre inspired Goebbels to privately vow, "Lang will be our director one day." In 1933, Goebbels banned Lang's film, "The Testament of Dr. Mabuse" then brought the director in for a meeting at which Lang was told that the Nazi's wanted to bring him into their inner circle and make him the official filmmaker of the party producing propaganda for Hitler's cause.

Lang responded by going on the run. He packed what he could and fled to Paris with his girlfriend, Lily Latte, who would remain in Lang's life until he died, traveling with him to Hollywood in 1936. Lang never saw his wife Thea again. Lang's second American film was "You Only Live Once" produced by Walter Wanger. At least at first, Wanger was Lang's idea of a good producer, precisely because he tended to keep his hands off the actual production. Wanger supported Lang and protected the director's final cut. Joan happily submitted to Fritz Lang's process. She felt he took her seriously in a way virtually no one had in Hollywood before. 

Vanessa: His style was very dictatorial and domineering and almost puppeteering his actors. I mean, he focused on every detail and rehearsed and rehearsed. So I think the person he might've reminded her of is her father Richard Bennett, who was definitely a stickler for detail and rehearsed Joan relentlessly when he put her in her first play "Jarnegan" that really started her whole career. She might've thought back to that. I think she was a disciplined person and pretty controlling herself, so I don't think it was incomprehensible to her why he would be so exacting, but the combination of Fritz Lang and Joan Bennett worked really well. 

Karina: Joan's character had originally been written as a streetwalker, but when the censors balked at that Lang decided to put a sewing machine in her character's bedroom to imply that she was a seamstress. Lang himself was notoriously fond of sex workers, and in the first three of the four films Joan started in for him there was an implication that if her characters didn't actually trade sex for money, they did at the very least trade on their sexuality to get what they wanted. If Walter had taken the first step to reinventing Joan's career by putting her in that Hedy Lamarr wig, Fritz Lang completed the job by casting Joan in films that foregrounded a kind of female sexuality that was taboo, even dangerous. Studios were resistant to making anti- Nazi films partially because they had performed inconsistently at the US box office, but "Manhunt" was a huge hit and Joan was lifted by its success. Joan's third anti- Nazi film was the 1941 action romance, "Confirm or Deny," in which she played a teletype operator who falls in love with a war correspondent during the blitz. In "Confirm or Deny" and "Manhunt" Joan plays the love interest. Her characters are not driving the story, they're mostly there to look pretty.

But because there's a war on, and she's playing women who are involved with men who were right in the thick of the fight against the Nazis, she gets to play a literal supporting role in that fight. Two years later, Joan appeared in Otto Preminger's "Margin For Error," in which the director, a German refugee, whose reputation for terrorizing actors rivaled even Fritz Lang's, directed himself playing an almost comically evil Nazi operating in America out of the German consulate. Joan played his unhappy wife, Sophia who married him as part of a deal to release her father from a concentration camp, a deal on which her Nazi husband has reneged. One night, everyone in the consulate gathers to listen to a Hitler radio address. In the middle of the speech as if in a trance, Sophia picks up a gun and shoots her husband in the head, the bombast of the radio address drowns out the gunshots, but Sophia's husband's secretary Max, a good German, sees it all and immediately rushes to help her. 

Max: "Here, put these on." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "I got to tell the police." 

Max: "What good will that do anybody? He deserved to die." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "But I had no right to."

Max: "He drove you to it. He destroyed every body who ever came near him. You must go. You're upset now. You can't think clearly."

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Where?" 

Max: "There's a bookkeeping. It's one o'clock but it's been one of our main equipment as a cooking book, even make arrangements. I'll give your note to him."

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Lisbon?"

Max: "Yes. Go to the - wait there until do you hear from me. Sophie, you have been through so much. Let me take care of you." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Yes Max."

Karina: When Sophia agrees to put her fate in this man's hands, the director moves in for a stunning closeup on Joan, her beautiful face, dominated by glassy eyes. It's the face of submission. With the exception of "The Man I Married" and her serious anti-Nazi films, Joan was positioned as an avatar for women who might be strong enough to take care of themselves yet, who fantasize that a handsome man could come along to take care of everything. Of course, this wasn't every woman's fantasy. And in fact, it may have been more of a male fantasy. A fantasy that when the war was all over, women would still need men.

If World War II gave Joan Bennett a new purpose and persona, it lit a fire under her husband, Walter Wanger too. 

Vanessa: It's interesting that Walter who was German- Jewish, was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences during World War II. He was able to be a liaison for government officials seeking to collaborate with Hollywood, and he spoke out against censorship, against Nazi Germany, and Hitler's rise. He arranged and financed the escape of numerous relatives from Nazi Europe, and he made a number of movies that were meant to help the war effort. I think during World War II, Walter was focused on movies that spoke to what was happening at the time, and he managed to make two very good ones. One with Alfred Hitchcock, "Foreign Correspondent," and the other was John Ford, "The Long Voyage Home." 

Karina: These films fell in line with the values Wanger had been espousing for years, in that instead of offering an escapist fantasy, they dealt with what he called actuality. And while primarily functioning as entertainment, they also not so subtly advocated a political message. 

Vanessa: I think Walter was very focused on how to communicate to the masses, not just the elite in Hollywood who would attend his academy award dinners. So his movies were very engaged with what was happening in the world, and how to motivate people and galvanize them into understanding the facts and why it mattered and why we should fight. 

Karina: But at the same time, Wanger was beginning his lucrative sideline as a producer of nutritive free films, such as "Arabian Nights," and "Salome, Where She Danced." These cream puffs of quote unquote 'orientalist, escapism, borrowed, familiar titles, mostly from marketing value.' one writer brought in to punch up the former film told Wanger it was a fraud to call the movie "Arabian Nights" when he was really making quote "nothing but a Western with camels." Wanger responded,

Walter Wanger [Reenactment]: "I know that, and it will make a million dollars."

Karina: These schlocky blockbusters in one sense, made it easier for Wanger to make the movies he really cared about because they added to the perception of him as a hit maker, but in the long run they may have made it harder for him to maintain his persona as a serious man. Certainly "Salome," a movie that basically exists to provide a narrative frame for imagery of future Munster's Mom, Yvonne De Carlo's gyrating midriff brings the hypocrisy of Wanger's campaign against escapism into sharp relief. But these contradictions in Walter's philosophy and career mirror where the country was at that time. United in supporting and fighting a war whose stakes could hardly have been higher and desperate for something else to think about. In this climate, an average American woman of marrying age served multiple roles.

She may have gone to work to make a living for herself and also to keep manufacturing going in the absence of millions, of working men. And she was often supposed to be some kind of inspirational figure. A married man in the military was encouraged to see the war as necessary to protect their wife and family. An unmarried man was encouraged to hang pinups of gorgeous, scantily clad women in their lockers and fantasize about coming home and impregnating American women. And actresses like Joan we're often expected to project an image of femininity that's squared all of those male fantasies with reality.

Vanessa: As an actress during World War II, Joan was supposed to be a role model for American women in every conceivable way, from how she looked and spoke and behaved, to how she juggled work and motherhood. And among the Hollywood acting set, what distinguished Joan was being known for being a mother and a homemaker. So to the extent that women who are accustomed to being at home were thrust into factory and work outside the home during World War II, Joan could really speak to them and she'd always managed, juggled really, multiple roles in jobs. 

Karina: In 1943, Joan was listed as the author on a book called, "How To Be Attractive," an advice manual, which made the case that it was a woman's patriotic duty to look as good as possible. And that physical self-improvement would pay dividends in other areas of a woman's life too. As Joan wrote, 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "The woman who achieves day after day, whatever other demands on her time and thought and appearance that is pleasing to the eye need apologize to no one having learned how to make the most of herself and the realm of personal appearance. She will have learned the elements of bringing order and beauty into her entire life and into the life she touches." 

Karina: "How to be Attractive" implicitly told women, "Yes, you have to go to work at the factory, but don't become a man. Continue to be attractive and these are the ways you can do it because otherwise when your husband comes back, he doesn't want a factory worker. He wants a beautiful home maker." Very little is known about the writing process behind this book, and certainly at the time it was quite common for stars to have their names attached to publications that were in essence advertising or a burrows using the stars persona to sell a product, which in turn sold the star. Though "How to be Attractive" is likely more of a commercial product than a work of personal expression, it's text often reflects the real Joan that her family knew. 

Vanessa: Joan definitely was progressive, but she wouldn't have called herself a liberated woman, or even said she was the one to wear the pants. I mean, she was definitely ahead of her time and interested in the ways in which women were held back by all the labor they performed and were not necessarily paid for or appreciated for. She also focuses, especially toward the end of the book on character and engagement with the world, and how that is also part of being attractive. 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "When we judge people, not by themselves, but by the ugly little labels of race and color, we are busily at work nursing, the soil that is sending other ruthless men to take the place of the Hitlers and the Mussolinis. They are the embodiment of all our own cruelty and arrogance for there is no greater beauty, than that brought to the face by compassion. There is no beauty or loveliness without it." 

Vanessa: It was very slyly feminist of Joan to sneak in ideas about the world and women in the world and the state of women in the United States in a book, women would be buying to learn about how to diet and what makeup to buy.

Karina: In the book, Joan attributes her own interest in the world at large to motherhood. Of course, she had been a mother for the entirety of her adult life, but when this book was released, Joan was on the verge of starting a new family with Walter Wanger, their eldest daughter, Stephanie, Vanessa's mom was born in June 1943. You can actually see a slight baby bump on Joan's normally extremely slim frame in "Margin For Error." After giving birth to Stephanie, Joan would go straight back to work, to star in another Fritz Lang film as the antithesis of feminine kindness. 

Vanessa: "The Woman in the Window" was Fritz Lang and cinematographer Milton Krasner's chamber work. It's sometimes referred to as Lang's best movie, and it's the one in which he pioneered the look and feel of the American noir. In France, it's said it was really one of the first movies to be given the film noir description. 

Karina: In Hollywood at this point, the idea of genre was mostly a marketing tool and the studios wouldn't consciously create a genre to capitalize on the ennui of modern man. What the film industry does consciously do is try to repeat successful formulas and the genre that would come to be known as film noir and the female archetype of the femme fatale would explode after 1944. That's in large part, thanks to two films. Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity," starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fritz Lang's "The Woman in the Window" staring Joan. Both films were big hits. "The Woman in the Window" did better at the box office than any previous Fritz Lang film made in Hollywood. 

Vanessa: Joan plays a femme fatale who is mysterious and sultry and wry and kind of creeps up on Edward G. Robinson in the first instance we meet her. Where he's looking through a store window at a painting of Joan and kind of fantasizing, and she walks up behind him and suddenly the image has doubled and it's as if the real her isn't even necessarily her, but she embodies his fantasy in that she invites him to her apartment for a drink, which is pretty forward. And the moment they're in there, her whole place feels like a seduction. 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "I'm not sure, but I suspect that another moment or two, you might've given a long, low solemn whistle."

Edward G. Robinson: "Well that, uh, rather embarressed me" 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Well you shouldn't. I regard it as an unusually sincere compliment because you don't look to me like a man, much given to whistling."

Edward G. Robinson: "Oh, oh no. It's not bad. Exactly. But, uh, if my admiration was that obvious, I'm afraid you might misunderstand it." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "May I help you?" 

Edward G. Robinson: "Could you?" 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "I'm not married. I have no designs on you and one drinks is all I care for. Is that right?" 

Edward G. Robinson: "That's right. Thank you very much."

Karina: But there's no sexual payoff to this seduction, at least not for the poor sap who has been drawn into this mysterious woman's web. Before he can even try to have sex with her, another man bursts into the apartment, and when the dust clears that man is dead. Now this poor nebbish and the femme fatale are mutually invested in keeping this crime a secret. Everything spirals out of control and in the film's original screenplay, Edward G. Robinson's character is driven to commit suicide. But that ending was verboten by the Hollywood sensors who deemed depiction of virtually anything antisocial, including suicide, to be equivalent to endorsement. So Fritz Lang tapped a controversial epilogue onto his film in which Edward G. Robinson wakes up and realizes that his whole episode with Joan Bennett has been nothing but a nightmare. In "The Woman in the Window", Eddie G's relief and resolve to stay away from all such temptation when he realizes he had only dreamed his transgressions showed that a lesson had been learned.

Vanessa: In general, these film noir feel like cautionary tales, like for Edward G. Robinson's character, don't stray from your humdrum marriage or your boring day job or dream of a tempting woman and different adventures because you will be punished. 

Karina: Some modern film noir fans see the ending of "The Woman in the Window" as a cop-out. Many other films identified with the genre and with their protagonists dying as a consequence for letting their darkest impulses takeover. But "The Woman in the Window", like every movie, is a product of the exact moment it was made. In 1944 no one knew how the war was going to end. One could still fantasize that they might be able to someday wake up and it would all be over, and you and your family would come out, no worse for wear physically or morally or mentally. Like it had all been a bad dream.

In her 1985 oral history interview, Joan remembered making "Woman in the Window" as a positive experience.

Ronald Davis: Well what was it about 'Woman in the Window' that you liked so much.

Joan Bennett: I like Fritz.

Karina: Joan Bennet's warm feelings towards Fritz Lang are surprising, given that in directing Joan, Lang cued her like a dog, snapping his fingers when he wanted her to turn her head. But, he got results that couldn't be denied. This film and the genre it helped birth gave 34 year old Joan Bennett a solid niche at last. Finally, she had found a recognizable and repeatable persona that she could carry with her from film to film. The new Joan Bennett character was salty, cynical, drop dead gorgeous, and people tended to drop dead around her.

Vanessa: I think she was good at playing the patriarchal woman on and off screen and both sides of it; the mother and the temptress, and maybe because she was solid in her identity as a mother, she felt comfortable playing the bad girl in movies. 

Karina: She'd come home a long way from sharing the stage with her father in "Jarnegan," a part she took only out of necessity when she found herself a single mom at age 18. But things tend to come full circle, and as Joan was basking in the success of "The Woman in the Window", her father, Richard Bennett was dying. 

Vanessa: Two years prior to his death, Richard had acted in Orson Welles, "The Magnificent Ambersons," which is a highlight of his career. It's one of the movies he's most well-known for, and Joan was taking care of him in his last years. Joan is the one who put them up in a house in Westwood, and after he had a heart attack, she took him to the Good Samaritan Hospital. And then sadly, he died on Contastance's 40th birthday. 

Karina: 20 years earlier, Richard had been considered the greatest actor of his generation. Now the first line of his obituaries described him as the father of the famous Bennett sisters. But there was really only one Bennett sister who was still in the spotlight. 

Vanessa: Basically, Constance's Hollywood movie star flamed out pretty quickly. I don't think she was as interested in trying to make it in Hollywood as Joan was. And so she went off and married, had children and did other work. Since last we saw Barbara, she had married singer Morton Downey, and was busy raising five children. Joan and Walter made several attempts to help her with her career, but after being a stage and film actress, and singer, and dancer in the twenties, she really hadn't done much. So by the time Richard passes away, Joan is the most famous Bennett by a long shot. 

Karina: Next time on Love is a Crime. Now at the peak of her power in Hollywood, Joan goes into business with her husband, Walter and Fritz Lang. She lives to tell the tale, but only just barely

Vanessa: Love is a Crime is a Vanity Fair presentation in partnership with Cadence 13. Executive produced, created, written and hosted by Vanessa Hope and Karina Longworth, starring Zooey Deschanel as Joan Bennett and John Ham as Walter Wanger. Our executive producer is Chris Corcoran, and our show runner is Jacquelyn Jamjoom. Production support provided by Nico Steele, Julia Doyle and Lindsay D Shoenholtz. Theme music composed by Lionel Cohen and Vybbes. Audio produced and supervised by Shelby Comstock Britten and mixed by Gintas Norvilla and Rainhouse. Special thanks to Katey Rich from Vanity Fair and Julie Shen and Kelly Bales from Condé Nast. 

Karina: Love is a Crime was written by Vanessa Hope and Karina Longworth who consulted the following published sources in researching this episode: "The Bennetts: An Acting Family," by Brian Kellow published by the University Press of Kentucky, used by permission from the University Press of Kentucky. "Walter Wanger Hollywood, Independent," by Matthew Bernstein published by the University of Minnesota Press, used by permission from the University of Minnesota Press. "The Bennet Playbill," by Joan Bennett, published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, used by permission of Henry Holt And Company, LLC, Joan Bennett estate and Lois Kibbee estate. Archival clips sourced from the tapes from the Ronald Davis oral history collection on the performing arts at Southern Methodist University, used by permission from DeGolyer library, Southern Methodist university. The tapes from the Walter Wanger collection at the University of Wisconsin Madison, used by permission from University of Wisconsin Madison. And clips from the following motion pictures: "Margin For Error," "Woman in the Window," and "The Man I Married." Fact checking by Laura Bullard.