The Hitchhiker - Man in the Window

Writer (Edward Albert) looking to sell a script and a bit down on his luck adapts a screenplay based on the lives of a cop (Michael Madsen, wearing an Elvis coif), his abused wife, and the wife’s photographer lover (who is a woman, considered a bit salacious at the time, although not anymore). Albert is a voyeur, trying to locate the perfect experiment to write about. With a listening device that picks up voices from short distance, Albert scopes out lives to exploit for a novel he can sell. He locates a woman with a shiner talking to her lover at a phone booth nearby. He follows her to the apartment where the lover lives (quite lavish and spacious), listens in, documents the goods in a literary form, and further spies on the marriage that is under duress. The wife, though, tells her lover that she feels she owes it to her husband to make it work. Albert somewhat looks on and listens as the couple has “makeup sex”. But when his lowlife publisher demands a proper ending (something *juicy*), Albert is not keen on interfering any further but desperate times call for desperate measures so he sets out to expose the wife’s adultery in order to get results that might bring about an ending that’ll sell copies. Albert has a lot of audio equipment, listening devices, and camera equipment…this guy is prepared to get his story!

Albert is shown as quite the creep. At the end he tries to help but makes everything even more difficult…but why? Why must he increasingly bring about a cop with anger/jealousy issues going after his wife and her lover? He could make up an ending you’d think without resorting to such chicanery. He calls up Madsen pretending to be her boyfriend. He sends flowers to their home. He sends a naked photograph taken from the artist’s loft to Madsen. All of these actions are certain to create hostility and perhaps even violence. In the end, because anthologies like The Hitchhiker are keen on punishing the wicked, Albert is due his comeuppance. But he does such stupid things that he really gets what he deserves. No one escapes the episode without addressing their wrongs. The wife should have just left her husband and remained with her lover. Clearly the women were in love and had developed warm relations while the marriage was toxic except for when the wife tried to make up with her husband and the two had sex. A minor band-aid on a wound that wasn’t about to heal. Albert certainly doesn’t help matters. If anything he just reopens the wound so it’ll gush. Madsen is gruff and insensitive, only showing a minor soft side when his wife appeals to him after he put a bruise on her eye, hoping they could repair the fractures in the marriage. He puts on the blue lights when driving through the city to find his wife’s lover’s apartment! So Albert motorcycles to the apartment to warn the women to flee before Madsen gets there. They don’t. A pistol whip to the side of the head, a bottle broken over the back of the head, cops arriving on scene and coming up the stairs; it all descends into chaos. And then there is Page Fletcher, a passersby telling us what kind of man Albert was and that his fate was his own making.