Rear Window Rating **** Masterpiece Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Written by John Michael Hayes With James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr, Wendell Corey, Judith Evelyn, Ross Bagdasarian, Georgine Darcy, and Irene Winston.
Turning a radio knob is actually the first decisive act by anyone in Rear Window. The camera briefly scans the courtyard that will remain the movie’s only location, showing the hero–L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart), better known as Jeff–fast asleep in the 92-degree morning heat. Then we see a composer (Ross Bagdasarian) across the way shaving, sufficiently irritated by a radio commercial (“Men, are you over 40? When you wake up in the morning, do you feel tired and run-down? Do you have that listless feeling?”) to switch stations to a rumba. The sound of an alarm clock shifts the focus to a middle-aged couple a few apartments away waking up on their fire escape, where they’ve bedded down to beat the heat. (In 1954 air conditioners were of course about as common as TV sets.) Then the camera dips down and to the left to show a curvy ballet dancer (Georgine Darcy) doing exercises while getting dressed–a musical-comedy heroine and va-va-voom 50s sex object, subsequently labeled “Miss Torso” by Jeff–before returning to Jeff and panning down to his left leg, which is in a plaster cast. It then crosses the room to show us succinctly who he is and how he broke his leg: we see a broken camera in front of a photograph of a racing-car accident, followed by other framed news photos, a negative close-up of a female model, and stacks of the Life-like magazine Jeff works for, with a positive image of the model’s photo on the cover.
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This introduction to Jeff reminds us of Hitchcock’s roots in silent cinema, but the highly developed sense of being current never falters. Some of this impression undoubtedly comes from the bantering dialogue of screenwriter John Michael Hayes, adapting a Cornell Woolrich story about an invalid so that it features more glamorous characters; Jeff’s girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), a chic, wealthy fashion buyer and former model, was apparently based in part on Hayes’s own fashion-model wife. Hayes was a radio writer with a flair for romantic comedy, at least in his first three scripts for Hitchcock–Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and the underrated and uncharacteristically utopian The Trouble With Harry–and he had a light touch that was never matched by Hitchcock’s subsequent screenwriters, with the exception of Ernest Lehman, who scripted North by Northwest and Family Plot. The high-gloss sophistication and wit extends to the treatment of sex in the movie, which is a lot more daring than most other Hollywood films of the period. When Lisa announces to Jeff that she’s staying overnight and then proceeds to model her tiny overnight bag and the negligee inside it–both items occasion a few uneasy leers from Jeff’s detective chum Tom (Wendell Corey)–one suspects the censors were placated only because Jeff’s plaster cast made sex between him and Lisa seem unlikely. It’s interesting that Hayes’s original script intimated that Lisa was somewhat frigid and that Jeff was frustrated about not having had sex with her–two hints Hitchcock presumably got Hayes to eliminate. (This production information, and much that follows, is drawn from Bill Krohn’s indispensable Hitchcock at Work, which is based on diverse production records and scheduled for publication by Phaidon in the near future.)
Two of the most poetic evocations of Greenwich Village to be found in movies, those in The Seventh Victim (1943) and Rear Window, were shot in Hollywood studios, and both are models of cozy proximity and narrative economy, featuring lairlike garrets and densely populated neighborhoods filled with mysterious artists of various sorts. The Seventh Victim–the fourth and in some ways the best of all the horror quickies produced by Val Lewton, despite the convulsive beauty and dreamlike fluidity of the three Jacques Tourneur features preceding it–was shot largely on refashioned RKO sets built for The Magnificent Ambersons to create a claustrophobic vision of a nocturnal, bohemian Manhattan.
According to the famous “Kuleshov experiment” in silent Russian cinema, the same close-up of actor Ivan Mozhukhin seen by separate audiences with a bowl of soup, or a coffin, or a little girl automatically conjured up a hungry man, or a mourner, or a pervert. As Hitchcock was fond of pointing out, the same principle is at work whenever the camera cuts from Stewart to the neighbor he’s gazing at. Krohn reports that to give himself more creative leeway in editing–if not to create backup footage to mollify the censors–Hitchcock did many alternate versions of scenes and shots. (Perhaps the funniest of these involved the running gag of the honeymoon couple: Krohn writes, “Looking out at Jeff and Lisa, the groom is summoned once again by his wife and tells her to ‘start without me’–a shocking suggestion that is explained when the shade goes up and we see that they have been playing chess the whole time.”)
More than anything, Rear Window, without ever ceasing to be a grand entertainment, is a moral investigation into what we do and what that implies whenever we follow a murder plot as armchair analysts. Hitchcock explores the question from just about every possible angle, including the issue of whether we ogle our neighbors the way we ogle characters in plays and movies–from a dark place and a safe distance. The movie begins and ends with a theatrical metaphor–the raising and lowering of the window shades in Jeff’s flat as if they were stage curtains, a symmetry that was brutally violated in Universal’s previous rerelease version, which ends instead with the Universal logo.
