Rear Window
| Rear Window | |
|---|---|
 theatrical poster |
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| Directed by | Alfred Hitchcock |
| Written by | Cornell Woolrich (story) John Michael Hayes |
| Starring | James Stewart Grace Kelly Wendell Corey Thelma Ritter |
| Music by | Franz Waxman |
| Cinematography | Robert Burks |
| Editing by | George Tomasini |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures (1954-83) Universal Studios (since 1983) USA Films (2000 re-release) |
| Release date(s) | August 1, 1954 (US) |
| Running time | 112 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | US$1 million (est.)[1] |
| IMDb | |
Rear Window is a 1954 suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and written by John Michael Hayes, based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story It Had to Be Murder. It stars James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey and Thelma Ritter, and features Raymond Burr. The film is considered by many film-goers, critics, and scholars to be one of Hitchcock's best and most thrilling pictures.[2]
Rear Window, which received four Oscar nominations, was added to the United States National Film Registry in 1997. It was ranked #48 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition).
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Plot
L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart), recuperating from a broken leg that has him in a cast up to his waist, is confined to a wheelchair in his small Greenwich Village apartment. He passes time by spying on his neighbors through his apartment's rear window. The neighbors include a dancer who exercises in her underwear, a lonely woman who lives by herself, a songwriter working at his piano, and several married couples, including a salesman (Raymond Burr) with a bedridden wife.
Every day, Jeffries is visited by Stella (Thelma Ritter), a home care nurse and Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), his girlfriend. He talks to both of them about his neighbors. After one of his neighbors, the salesman, makes repeated late-night trips carrying a large case, Jeffries concentrates his attention on him, and notices that the bedridden wife is now gone. Jeffries pulls out his binoculars and then a camera with a large telephoto lens to get a better look. He sees the salesman clean a large knife and handsaw. Later, the salesman ties a large packing crate with heavy rope, and has moving men haul it away. By now, Jeffries, Stella, and Lisa have concluded the missing wife has been murdered by the salesman. They check his name on the front of the building: Lars Thorwald.
Jeffries calls in an old Army buddy named Doyle (Wendell Corey) who is now a detective and explains the situation to him. After checking, the detective finds that Mrs. Thorwald is in the country, has sent a postcard to her husband, and the packing crate they had seen was full of her clothes. Chastised, they all admit to feeling a little ghoulish, even disappointed to find out there was not a murder after all. Jeffries and Lisa settle down for an evening alone, but a scream soon pierces the courtyard. One of the neighbors had a little dog they would let roam around the yard, and now it is dead. All of the neighbors rush to their windows to see what has happened, except for one: Jeffries notices that Thorwald sits unmoving in his dark apartment, with only the tip of his cigarette glowing.
Convinced that Thorwald is guilty after all, they slip a letter under his door asking "What have you done with her?" to watch his reaction. Calling his apartment, Jeffries tells Thorwald to meet him at a bar down the street, as a pretext to getting him out of the apartment. He thinks Thorwald killed the little dog to keep it from digging up something buried in the courtyard flower patch. When Thorwald leaves, Lisa and Stella grab a shovel and start digging, but after a few minutes, they find nothing.
Refusing to give up, Lisa climbs the fire escape to Thorwald's apartment and squeezes in an open window, much to Jeffries's alarm. Rummaging around the apartment, Lisa finds Mrs. Thorwald's purse and wedding ring, things she would never have left behind on a trip. She holds them up for Jeffries to see, but he can only watch in fear as Thorwald comes back up the stairs to the apartment. Lisa is trapped inside the apartment. Calling the police as Thorwald goes in, he and Stella watch helplessly as Lisa tries to hide, but is found by Thorwald moments later. They see her try to talk her way out, but Thorwald grabs her and begins to assault her. Terrified by their helplessness, they watch as he turns out the lights, and listen as Lisa screams for help. The police arrive and beat on Thorwald's door, saving Lisa just in time. With the police present, Jeffries sees Lisa's hands behind her back, pointing to Mrs. Thorwald's ring, which is now on her finger. Thorwald sees this as well, and realizing that she is signaling to someone across the courtyard, turns to look directly at Jeffries.
Pulling back into the dark, Jeffries calls Doyle, who is now convinced that Thorwald is guilty of something, and agrees to help get Lisa out of jail. Stella takes all the cash they have for bail and heads for the police station, leaving Jeffries alone. He sees that Thorwald's apartment lights are off. Down below, he hears the door to his own building slam shut, then slow footsteps begin climbing the stairs. Looking for a method of defense, Jeffries can find only the flash for his camera. He grabs a box of flashbulbs. Footsteps stop outside his door, then it slowly opens. Thorwald stands in the dark. "Who are you?" he asks. "What do you want from me?" Jeffries does not answer, but as Thorwald comes for him he sets off the flash, blinding Thorwald for a few seconds. Thorwald fumbles his way to Jeffries's wheelchair, grabs him, and pushes him towards the open window. Hanging onto the ledge, yelling for help, Jeffries sees Lisa, the detective, and the police all rush in. Thorwald is pulled back, but it is too late; Jeffries slips and falls just as the police run up beneath him. Luckily they break his fall, and Lisa sweeps him up in her arms. Thorwald confesses to the murder of his wife, and the police take him away.
A few days later the heat has lifted, and Jeffries sleeps peacefully in his wheelchair – now with two broken legs from the fall. Lisa reclines happily beside him.
Cast
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Cast notes:
- Alfred Hitchcock makes his traditional cameo appearance in the songwriter's apartment, where he is seen winding a clock.
Production
The film was shot entirely at Paramount studios, including an enormous set on one of the soundstages, and employed the Technicolor process in use at the time. There was also careful use of sound, including natural sounds and music drifting across the apartment building courtyard to James Stewart's apartment. At one point, the voice of Bing Crosby can be heard singing "To See You Is to Love You" originally from the Paramount release Road to Bali (1952).
Hitchcock used famed designer Edith Head to design costumes in all of his Paramount films. With Hitchcock's encouragement, Head designed especially "romantic" dresses for Grace Kelly.[citation needed]
Although veteran Hollywood composer Franz Waxman is credited with the score for the film, his contributions were limited to the opening and closing titles and the piano tune played by one of the neighbors during the film. This was Waxman's final score for Hitchcock. The director used primarily "natural" sounds throughout the film.[3]
Reception
A "benefit world premiere" for the film, with United Nations officials and "prominent members of the social and entertainment worlds"[4] in attendance, was held on August 4, 1954 in New York City, with proceeds going to the American-Korean Foundation (an aid organization founded soon after the end of the Korean War[5] and headed by President Eisenhower's brother). Critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times attended that premiere, and in his review called the film a "tense and exciting exercise" and Hitchcock a director whose work has a "maximum of build-up to the punch, a maximum of carefully tricked deception and incidents to divert and amuse"; Crowther also notes:[4]
- Mr. Hitchcock's film is not "significant." What it has to say about people and human nature is superficial and glib. But it does expose many facets of the loneliness of city life and it tacitly demonstrates the impulse of morbid curiosity. The purpose of it is sensation, and that it generally provides in the colorfulness of its detail and in the flood of menace toward the end.
Time magazine called it "just possibly the second most entertaining picture (after The 39 Steps) ever made by Alfred Hitchcock" and a film in which there is "never an instant...when Director Hitchcock is not in minute and masterly control of his material."; the review did note the "occasional studied lapses of taste and, more important, the eerie sense a Hitchcock audience has of reacting in a manner so carefully foreseen as to seem practically foreordained."[6]
Variety magazine called the film a "one of Alfred Hitchcock's better thrillers" which "combines technical and artistic skills in a manner that makes this an unusually good piece of murder mystery entertainment."[7]
Nearly 30 years after the film's initial release, Roger Ebert reviewed the Universal re-release held after Hitchcock's estate was settled. He said the film "develops such a clean, uncluttered line from beginning to end that we're drawn through it (and into it) effortlessly. The experience is not so much like watching a movie, as like ... well, like spying on your neighbors. Hitchcock traps us right from the first....And because Hitchcock makes us accomplices in Stewart's voyeurism, we're along for the ride. When an enraged man comes bursting through the door to kill Stewart, we can't detach ourselves, because we looked too, and so we share the guilt and in a way we deserve what's coming to him."[8]
Analysis
Hitchcock's fans and film scholars have taken particular interest in the way the relationship between Mr. Jeffries and Lisa can be compared to the lives of the neighbors they are spying upon. The film invites speculation as to which of these paths Mr. Jeffries and Lisa will follow. Many of these points are considered in Tania Modleski's feminist theory book, The Women Who Knew Too Much:[9]
- Thorwald and his wife are a reversal of Mr. Jeffries and Lisa (Thorwald looks after his invalid wife just as Lisa looks after the invalid Mr. Jeffries). However, Thorwald's hatred of his nagging wife mirrors Mr. Jeffries's arguments with Lisa.
- The newly wed couple initially seem perfect for each other (they spend nearly the entire movie in their bedroom with the blinds drawn), but at the end we see that their marriage is in trouble and the wife begins to nag the husband. Similarly, Mr. Jeffries is afraid of being 'tied down' by marriage to Lisa.
- The middle-aged couple with the dog seem content living at home. They have the kind of uneventful lifestyle that horrifies Mr. Jeffries.
- The music composer and Miss Lonelyhearts, the depressed spinster, lead frustrating lives, and at the end of the movie find comfort in each other (the composer's new tune draws Miss Lonelyhearts away from suicide, and the composer thus finds value in his work). There is a subtle hint in this tale that Lisa and Mr. Jeffries are meant for each other, despite his stubbornness. The piece the composer creates is called "Lisa's Theme" in the credits.
The characters themselves verbally point out a similarity between Lisa and Miss Torso (played by Georgine Darcy) — the scantily-clad ballet dancer who has all-male parties.
Other analysis[specify] centers on the relationship between Mr. Jeffries and the other side of the apartment block, seeing it as a symbolic relationship between spectator and screen. Film theorist Mary Ann Doane has made the argument[citation needed] that Mr. Jeffries, representing the audience, becomes obsessed with the screen, where a collection of storylines are played out. This line of analysis has often followed a feminist approach to interpreting the film. It is Doane who, using Freudian analysis to claim women spectators of a film become "masculinized," pays close attention to Mr. Jeffries's rather passive attitude to romance with the elegant Lisa, that is, until she crosses over from the spectator side to the screen, seeking out the wedding ring of Thorwald's murdered wife. It is only then that Mr. Jeffries shows real passion for Lisa. In the climax, when he is pushed through the window (the screen), he has been forced to become part of the show.
Other issues such as voyeurism and feminism are analyzed in John Belton's book Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window.
Furthermore, released in 1954 at the very height of McCarthyism, this film was apparently cashing in on widespread fears of nuclear war, fascism, and threats from totalitarian communism and brought them into America's back yard.[citation needed] No longer could the government be depended upon to discover, let alone solve, major crimes. Instead, the film emphasized the necessity of a "deputized" citizenry to keep tabs on their neighbors and bring the undesirables to justice.
Legacy
The film received four Academy Award nominations: Best Director for Alfred Hitchcock, Best Screenplay for John Michael Hayes, Best Cinematography, Color for Robert Burks, Best Sound Recording for Loren L. Ryder, Paramount Pictures. John Michael Hayes won a 1955 Edgar Award for best motion picture.
In 1997, Rear Window was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". This film was ranked #14 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills. It was ranked #48 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition). In June 2008, the AFI revealed its "Ten Top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community, Rear Window was acknowledged as the third best film in the mystery genre.[10]
Rear Window was restored by the team of Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz for its 1999 limited theatrical re-release and the Collector's Edition DVD release.
Ownership
Ownership of the copyright in Woolrich's original story was eventually litigated before the United States Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990). The film was copyrighted in 1954 by Patron Inc. — a production company set up by Hitchcock and Stewart. As a result, Stewart and Hitchcock's estate became involved in the Supreme Court case.
Rear Window is one of several of Hitchcock's films originally released by Paramount Pictures that were later acquired by Universal Studios.
Influence
Rear Window has been repeatedly re-told, parodied, or referenced. The most obvious is the 1998 remake of the same name, which had the main character completely paralyzed instead of just having a recently broken leg, due to its star's real-life condition.
Film
Brian De Palma paid homage to Rear Window with his film Body Double (which also added touches of Hitchcock's Vertigo). The 2001 film Head Over Heels starring Freddie Prinze Jr., in which a young woman falls for a man she believes she saw commit a murder, closely follows the plot of Rear Window. Marcos Bernstein's The Other Side of The Street (2004) also makes a reference to Rear Window, albeit with a Brazilian twist. Robert Zemeckis' What Lies Beneath is another film that pays tribute to this film and other Hitchcock features. Clubhouse Detectives (1996) is a retelling, aimed at a younger audience, where a young boy sees a neighbor kill a student and bury her under his floor boards.
Disturbia (2007) is a modern day retelling, with the protagonist (Shia LaBeouf) under house arrest instead of laid up with a broken leg and who believes that his neighbor is a serial killer rather than having committed a single murder. On September 5, 2008, the Sheldon Abend Trust sued Steven Spielberg, Dreamworks, Viacom, and Universal Studios, alleging that the producers of Disturbia violated the rights of Abend and the Woolrich estate, by not acquiring the rights to the Woolrich story.
Television
References to Rear Window in the 1980s include the Kate and Allie 1985 episode "Rear Window" and the ALF 1987 episode "Lookin' Through the Windows". During the 1990s, the references includes The Simpsons 1994 episode "Bart of Darkness". Since 2000, there have been at least three references:
- That '70s Show 2000 episode "Too Old to Trick or Treat, Too Young to Die"
- Home Movies 2004 episode "Definite Possible Murder"
- The Venture Bros. 2004 episode "The Incredible Mr. Brisby" quotes Grace Kelly's famous entrance line, announcing her character's name
Notes
- ^ IMDB Business and Box Office Info
- ^ Rear Window Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes
- ^ DVD documentary
- ^ a b A 'Rear Window' View Seen at the Rivoli, a August 5, 1954 review from The New York Times
- ^ Statement by the President on the fund-raising campaign of the American-Korean Foundation from a University of California, Santa Barbara website
- ^ The New Pictures, an August 2, 1954 review from Time magazine
- ^ Review of Rear Window, a July 14, 1954 article from Variety magazine
- ^ 1983 Review of Rear Window re-release by Roger Ebert
- ^ Modleski, Tania, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc., 1989) ISBN 0-415-97362-7.
- ^ "AFI's 10 Top 10", American Film Institute (2008-06-17). Retrieved on 2008-06-18.
External links
- Rear Window at the Internet Movie Database
- Rear Window at the TCM Movie Database
- Rear Window at Allmovie
- Rear Window at Box Office Mojo
- Rear Window at The Numbers
- Rear Window Gallery at eyegate.com
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