Rear Window is a 1954 American mystery thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock and written by John Michael Hayes, based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder". Originally released by Paramount Pictures, the film stars James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter, and Raymond Burr. It was screened at the 1954 Venice Film Festival in competition for the Golden Lion.
Rear Window is shot almost entirely from within one room and from the point-of-view outside the window. The film was made with a budget of $1 million , and grossed $27 million during its initial release .
Rear Window is considered by many filmgoers, critics, and scholars to be one of Hitchcock's best films, as well as one of the greatest films ever made. It received four Academy Award nominations, and was ranked number 42 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list and number 48 on the 10th-anniversary edition, and in 1997 was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Plot
In the mid-1950s, photojournalist L. B. "Jeff" Jefferies, recuperating from assignment-related injuries, in a cast from his hip to his foot, is wheelchair-bound in his Greenwich Village apartment. His mid-floor rear window looks onto a courtyard with small garden plots, surrounded on four sides by apartments in adjoining buildings. Jeff is regularly visited by Stella, a nurse, and his couture-clad girlfriend, Lisa Fremont, a model and socialite. Jeff and Lisa disagree about whether their relationship can survive different lifestyles.
During a heat wave, Jeff watches his neighbors through open windows, including a newlywed couple; a professional dancer coined "Miss Torso"; a songwriter with writer's block; a spinster who pantomimes dates with pretend suitors, "Miss Lonely-Hearts"; and traveling costume jewelry salesman Lars Thorwald, henpecked by his bedridden wife. One night, Jeff hears a woman scream, followed by the sound of breaking glass. Later that night, he observes Thorwald making repeated excursions carrying his sample case. After Jeff has fallen asleep, Thorwald leaves his apartment along with a woman.
The next morning, Jeff notices that Thorwald's wife seems to be gone, and Thorwald is cleaning a large knife and a handsaw. Movers haul away a large trunk. After surveilling with binoculars and a camera's telephoto lens, Jeff grows suspicious of Thorwald's activities. Convinced Thorwald has murdered his wife, he first tells Stella, who becomes morbidly interested in the case, and then Lisa, who doubts him until they notice that Thorwald's wife is no longer in bed and the mattress is rolled up.
Jeff calls his friend, detective Tom Doyle, to request that he investigate Thorwald. A skeptical Doyle investigates, finds nothing suspicious, and posits that Thorwald sent his wife on a vacation upstate. Jeff and Lisa are temporarily mollified by this explanation. Later that night, however, a neighbor's dog is found dead in the courtyard; the previous day, Thorwald had chased the dog away from digging his garden flowerbed. The dog's alarmed owner cries out, drawing the attention of everyone except Thorwald, who sits furtively in his dark apartment. Now convinced his theory is true, Jeff looks at slides taken two weeks earlier and notices that Thorwald has replanted flowers in his garden, possibly to bury a body part.
The following night, Jeff telephones to lure Thorwald away from his apartment, enabling Lisa and Stella to investigate Thorwald's flowerbed. Finding nothing, Lisa climbs into Thorwald's open window to search his apartment. Stella hurries back to Jeff.
While Lisa is searching, Jeff and Stella are distracted watching Miss Lonely-Hearts contemplating an overdose. Returning unexpectedly, Thorwald catches and attacks Lisa, causing Lisa to cry out. Jeff calls the police to report a man assaulting a woman at Thorwald's apartment. The police arrive to intervene as Lisa and Thorwald scuffle. During police questioning, Lisa signals to Jeff that she is wearing Mrs. Thorwald's wedding ring. Seeing this, Thorwald realizes Jeff is surveilling his apartment. Lacking proof to accuse Thorwald of murder, Lisa allows herself to be arrested for breaking and entering to be taken away safely. Coincidentally, the songwriter had finished his song "Lisa", playing loudly; enthralled by the tune, Miss Lonely-Hearts abandons her suicide attempt.
Jeff phones Doyle, leaving an urgent message, while Stella bails Lisa out of jail. Locating Jeff's apartment, Thorwald attacks him; Jeff's only defense in a darkened apartment is snapping his camera flash bulbs in Thorwald's eyes. While they grapple, Doyle and police officers arrive, followed by Lisa and Stella. Police apprehend Thorwald just as he drops Jeff out of his window. Thorwald confesses to his wife's murder, dumping her remains in the East River, and relocating a hat box containing her head after the dog tried to dig it up.
Days later, the heat wave has broken, and life in the apartment complex has returned to normal. Miss Lonely-Hearts is socializing with the songwriter in his studio apartment while he plays piano; Thorwald's neighbors get a new puppy; Miss Torso's unprepossessing boyfriend returns from army deployment, and the newlyweds are more aloof. Having broken his other leg in the fall, Jeff remains wheelchair-bound, now with both legs in casts. As he naps, Lisa, in casual attire, surreptitiously switches from reading a book on travel exploration to a fashion magazine.
Cast
James Stewart as L. B. "Jeff" Jefferies, a photojournalist Grace Kelly as Lisa Fremont, a model Wendell Corey as Lt. Thomas "Tom" J. Doyle, an NYPD detective Thelma Ritter as Stella, a nurse Raymond Burr as Lars Thorwald Judith Evelyn as "Miss Lonely-Hearts" Ross Bagdasarian as the songwriter Georgine Darcy as "Miss Torso" Sara Berner and Frank Cady as the couple living above the Thorwalds Jesslyn Fax as "Miss Hearing Aid", the sculptress Rand Harper and Havis Davenport as the newlyweds Irene Winston as Mrs. Anna Thorwald Uncredited Harry Landers as young man guest of Miss Lonely-Hearts Ralph Smiles as Carl, the waiter Fred Graham as detective 1 Eddie Parker as detective 2 Anthony Warde as detective 3 Kathryn Grant as girl at songwriter's party Marla English as girl at songwriter's party Bess Flowers as woman at songwriter's party with poodle Benny Bartlett as Stanley, Miss Torso's returning boyfriend Dick Simmons as man with Miss Torso
Cast notes Director Alfred Hitchcock makes his traditional cameo appearance in the songwriter's apartment, where he is seen winding a clock.
Themes Analysis Rear Window is filmed almost entirely within Jeff's apartment and from his near-static point-of-view at his window. In Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," she identifies what she sees as voyeurism and scopophilia in Hitchcock's movies, with Rear Window used as one example of how she sees cinema as incorporating the patriarchy into the way that pleasure is constructed and signaled to the audience. Additionally, she sees the "male gaze" as especially evident in Rear Window in the portrayal of characters such as the dancer "Miss Torso", who is a spectacle for both Jeff and the audience (through his substitution) to enjoy.
In his 1954 review of the film, François Truffaut suggested "this parable: The courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses."
Voyeurism John Fawell notes in Dennis Perry's book Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror that Hitchcock "recognized that the darkest aspect of voyeurism ... is our desire for awful things to happen to people ... to make ourselves feel better, and to relieve ourselves of the burden of examining our own lives." Hitchcock challenges the audience, forcing them to peer through his rear window and become exposed to, as Donald Spoto calls it in his 1976 book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures, the "social contagion" of acting as voyeur.
In his book Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window", John Belton further addresses the underlying issues of voyeurism which he asserts are evident in the film. He says "Rear Window's story is 'about' spectacle; it explores the fascination with looking and the attraction of that which is being looked at."
In an explicit example of a condemnation of voyeurism, Stella expresses her outrage at Jeff's voyeuristic habits, saying, "In the old days, they'd put your eyes out with a red hot poker" and "What people ought to do is get outside and look in for a change."
With further analysis, Jeff's positive evolution understandably would be impossible without voyeurism—or as Robin Wood puts it in his 1989 book Hitchcock's Films Revisited, "the indulging of morbid curiosity and the consequences of that indulgence."
Production
Writing The screenplay, which was written by John Michael Hayes, was based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story It Had to Be Murder. However, in 1990 the question as to who owned the film rights of Woolrich's original story went before the Supreme Court of the United States in Stewart v. Abend. Although the film was copyrighted in 1954 by Patron Inc., a production company set up by Hitchcock and Stewart, a subsequent rights holder refused to acknowledge previous rights agreements. As a result, Stewart and Hitchcock's estate became involved in the Supreme Court case. Its outcome led to the litigant, Sheldon Abend, becoming credited as a producer of the 1998 remake of Rear Window.
Filming The film was shot entirely at stage 18 at Paramount Studios which included an enormous indoor set to replicate a Greenwich Village courtyard, with the set stretching from the bottom of the basement storeroom to the top of the lighting grid in the ceiling. The lighting was rigged with four interchangeable scene lighting arrangements: morning, afternoon, evening, and night-time."Rear Window Ethics" documentary extra on blu-ray and DVD release of the film Set designers Hal Pereira and Joseph MacMillan Johnson spent six weeks building the extremely detailed and complex set, which ended up being the largest of its kind at Paramount. One of the unique features of the set was its massive drainage system, constructed to accommodate the rain sequence in the film. They also built the set around a highly nuanced lighting system which was able to create natural-looking lighting effects for both the day and night scenes. Though the address given in the film is 125 W. Ninth Street in New York's Greenwich Village, the set was actually based on a real courtyard located at 125 Christopher Street.
The famous uninterrupted 90 second scene at the beginning of the film in which the main character Jefferies and his neighbourhood are introduced to the viewer was created with meticulous care. It required many rehearsals and ten takes during half a day of filming before it was completed. Meticulous details in the filming also include such effects as the opposite building seen reflected in Jefferies' camera lens.