Some notes on Rear Window
[The first section of these notes re-prints the entry on Rear Window from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story'.1 The next section provides some additional commentary. (I have kept footnotes to a minimum.) In addition, I print here my answers to four questions sent to me recently - February 2003 - by a film student in England about aspects of 'voyeurism' in Rear Window. KM]
First screening July 1954
Production company Paramount/Patron, Inc.
Duration 112 mins
Technicolor
[During a heat wave, normally itinerant news photographer L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) finds himself confined by a broken leg to a wheelchair in his Greenwich Village apartment. Each day, and often into the night, he has little to do but gaze out his rear window at the activities of his neighbours in the surrounding apartments. Jeff’s main visitors are his fiancée Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), a high-fashion model, and Stella (Thelma Ritter), a wiry insurance company nurse. When Jeff says he suspects that his neighbour directly opposite, costume jewellery salesman Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), has murdered his wife, no one pays much attention at first. Lisa is mainly concerned to overcome Jeff’s reluctance to get married. But Jeff intensifies his window-gazing, using binoculars and even a telephoto lens. After Lisa volunteers to cross the courtyard and obtain evidence against Thorwald, trouble erupts. Thorwald catches her in his apartment. Jeff frantically calls the police, who come and arrest Lisa. Meanwhile, having learnt that Jeff has been spying on him, Thorwald decides to pay a visit. Only last-minute intervention by Jeff’s detective friend Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey) saves him from the enraged killer.]
Rear Window takes place during a New York heat wave. More than a plot device explaining why everyone has their windows open, the heat intensifies a crisis for which it also serves as a metaphor. Photographer Jeff not only suddenly finds himself immobilised by a broken leg, but his beautiful fiancée Lisa wants to ‘immobilise’ him in another way by making him give up his top job with 'Life' magazine and settle down with her. Thus the film, like Notorious, depicts a personality conflict of two people who love each other. The heat wave functions like the sultry Rio climate in the earlier film, adding both realism and ‘tone’. Rear Window has tone aplenty, as well as classic suspense. Hitchcock noted modestly that his batteries were well charged when he was making it.
A key figure behind the film was Hitchcock’s agent at MCA, Lew Wasserman. In the spring of 1953, Wasserman bought on Hitchcock’s instructions a screen treatment of Cornell Woolrich’s 1942 short story ‘Rear Window’ (originally called ‘It Had To Be Murder’). The treatment was by leading stage director Joshua Logan. Shortly afterwards, Wasserman arranged a deal with Paramount Pictures for Hitchcock to make a total of nine films. (In the event, he only made six.) The first of these was Rear Window, and Hitchcock had a screenwriter already lined up. A regular listener to radio shows like 'Suspense', the director had asked MCA if they knew of John Michael Hayes. Not only had Hayes adapted many of the 'Suspense' shows, he had recently started writing film scripts, including one for the James Stewart picture Thunder Bay (1953). A delighted MCA replied that Hayes was another of their clients.
Hitchcock and Hayes met together twice at Warner Brothers during production of Dial M for Murder. Woolrich’s original story, Hitchcock noted, contained many good ideas, such as the moment when hero Hal Jeffries sends the suspected wife-killer Thorwald a note asking ‘What have you done with her?’ and studies Thorwald’s reaction through a spyglass. However, the story had no love interest. Logan’s treatment overcame that basic problem by giving Jeffries an actress girlfriend named ‘Trink’, but Hitchcock wanted a part for Grace Kelly that would bring out the fire in her. He asked Hayes to write a new treatment. After spending a week with Kelly on the set of Dial M for Murder, and noting her sly humour and sexiness that hadn’t been apparent in her previous pictures, Hayes obliged. It was on the basis of Hayes’ treatment that James Stewart agreed to star in the picture.
When the present author interviewed Hayes in 1975, we spoke about what Hayes thought he had given Hitchcock. He singled out the quality of ‘warmth’. He had always felt that a film like The Paradine Case was too cold. For Rear Window he invented the down-to-earth character Stella, and as early as possible had her speak several comic lines. A related idea was to break down the unconscious ‘hostility’ that members of an audience invariably feel towards both each other and the film. Stella’s opening remark from the doorway, ticking Jeff off for being a Peeping Tom, rivets our attention. Moments later, she recalls the time she’d predicted the stock market crash of ’29: ‘When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go.’ That’s the sort of line that makes an audience laugh out loud and prepare to enjoy themselves, Hayes said.
Hayes also noted that the part of Lisa was written as a combination of Grace Kelly and his own wife, who was a high-fashion photographer’s model. Also drawn from the Hayes’ own experience was the suggestive business with Lisa’s Mark Cross overnight case that spills open revealing its fluffy and very feminine contents. Recently, Donald SpotoFN has claimed that Lisa and Jeff’s relationship was based by the film-makers on the affair between Ingrid Bergman and photographer Robert Capa in 1946, but reportedly Hayes has never confirmed this. (Jeff’s reluctance to forgo his globe-trotting career in order to settle down in a conventional marriage may not be so rare in real life. For example, the film-maker David Lean comes to mind.)
The script of Rear Window does have real warmth. What’s also clear is that Hitchcock responded in kind. Running through the film is a marvellous sensuousness, starting with the two initial pans around the courtyard, each coming to rest on Jeff’s perspiring face as he sleeps beside his open window. The film was shot entirely on one gigantic set whose construction was supervised by Hitchcock personally. It comprised thirty-one apartments, a Manhattan skyline, gardens, trees, smoking chimneys and an alley leading to a street complete with a bar, pedestrians and moving traffic. The entire area was required to be lit for both day and night settings, and to be capable of withstanding a heavy rainstorm (provided by special ‘rain birds’ installed above the set). The rain scene is another sensuous highlight. When the rain comes in the early hours of the morning, it has a summery quality. It’s heavy enough to drive the couple sleeping on their fire escape back indoors in an undignified scramble, yet gentle enough not to dissuade Thorwald from his several mysterious trips to and from his apartment, carrying a suitcase.
Principal photography was completed by January 1954, having taken approximately eight weeks. The overall budget scarcely exceeded $1,000,000. Following its world premiere at New York’s Rivoli Theater on 4 August 1954, the film and its performances were hailed by critics and public alike. 'Time' thought it ‘[p]ossibly the second most entertaining picture (after The 39 Steps) ever made by ... Hitchcock.’ By May 1956, it had grossed $10,000,000.
Rear Window draws on subject matter related to the crime-thriller format with which Hitchcock would have felt fully at home. Three important literary influences would all have been on his shelves: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s classic tale of the uncanny ‘The Sandman’ (Hitchcock owned several editions of Hoffmann), H.G. Wells’s 1894 short story ‘Through a Window’ (Hitchcock owned a set of Wells’s complete works), and Aldous Huxley’s famous 1922 short story loosely based on the then-current Armstrong murder case, ‘The Gioconda Smile’. The relevance of Hoffmann’s tale may be seen from even a partial synopsis. The student Nathanael becomes fixated on a house opposite his own occupied by Professor Spallanzani and his beautiful ‘daughter’ called Olympia. Watching the house through binoculars, the student quite loses interest in his regular girlfriend, Klara. One day, he goes to the house and at last encounters Olympia - who turns out to be just a life-size doll ...
This is of course the basis of the ballet 'Coppélia' (1870). The tale is also the main subject of Freud’s famous essay ‘The Uncanny’, in which he alludes to Spallanzani as a potentialy ‘castrating’ father-figure. As for Olympia, Freud writes: ‘She can be nothing else than a materialisation of Nathanael’s feminine attitude towards his father in infancy’. Freud adds that Nathanael’s ‘enslavement’ to Olympia shows a purely ‘narcissistic’ kind of love. In short, Nathanael has Oedipal problems - all of which recur, with variations, in Rear Window. For example, Jeff confined to his wheelchair feels himself ‘infantilised’ and rendered ‘impotent’ because of his broken leg, and is forced into a state of passive looking. (Hitchcock here implies a parallel with the cinema spectator, whose ‘relative narcissism’ has been remarked by critics Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson.)FN Over the way, he sees a quarrelling couple whose relationship reflects some of his own current feelings towards Lisa. And when the wife disappears, Jeff sends his note asking ‘What have you done with her?’, whose wording represents the classic question of a child who observes the ‘primal scene’ (the parents’ love-making). Finally, Jeff confronts the father-figure himself, Thorwald, and engages with him in a life-death struggle.
Wells’s ‘Through a Window’ begins: ‘After his legs were set, they carried Bayley into the study and put him on a couch before the open window.’ The story patently influenced Woolrich’s 'Rear Window', and ends in similar fashion with an outsider invading the apartment to attack the hero.2 In Bayley’s case, he defends himself by throwing medicine bottles at his assailant. The logic here recalls the film’s, in which Jeff, a photographer, defends himself with flash bulbs which he fires at Thorwald. However, the film’s symbolism is richer, for the assault on a person’s eyes constitutes a further reference to ‘castration’ (cf discussion of Spellbound in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story').
‘Castration’ is also implicit in Huxley’s ‘The Gioconda Smile’, but this time it’s castration by a woman. The story is about a man suspected of murdering his nagging wife, and about his mistress, whom he finally jilts. The latter becomes a Fatal Woman, much like the figure evoked in Walter Pater’s celebrated essay on the ‘Mona Lisa’. Camille Paglia calls such a figure ‘the castrating and castrated mother’, a description which rather well fits Lisa in Rear Window. For example, the nagging Mrs Thorwald, who even looks like Lisa, is certainly a castrating woman; and we’re invited to draw parallels. (Hitchcock’s own comment on Lisa, to Peter Bogdanovich, was that New York has many such ‘active’ women, ‘more like men, some of them’.) Equally, once Mrs Thorwald disappears, Jeff’s interest is piqued all the more: has her husband really killed her? That is, has she been castrated in her turn?
A turning point in Jeff’s attitude to Lisa comes when she makes him an offer he can’t refuse: ‘I’ll trade you - my feminine intuition for a bed for the night.’ (About here the soundtrack plays the hit song, ‘Mona Lisa’.) Until now, feminine intuition has been faintly ridiculed, as when Stella claims that she’d predicted the crash of ’29. Indeed, femininity itself has been mocked by ‘macho’ Jeff, feigning interest in what Slim Hayward wore at cocktails. But now the film takes both femininity and ‘motherliness’ on board with a vengeance. When Lisa encounters danger by crossing the courtyard and entering Thorwald’s apartment, Jeff finally becomes anxious for her. In Hitchcock’s words, ‘the mother instinct comes out in him’. And when Jeff himself is injured at the end, Lisa rushes to cradle his head in her lap. Her simple floral dress, one which isn’t high-fashion, signals her own emerging femininity (cf Constance in Spellbound), and Hitchcock lets the image fill the screen almost like a field of flowers. Or a nursery picture!
Sure enough, we learn in a coda that Jeff has broken his other leg (ie he’s now doubly castrated!). This is in line with Camille Paglia’s remark apropos Pater’s ‘Mona Lisa’ that the Great Mother - rather than anything done by men - ultimately prevails. (To Catch a Thief ends with a grim mother-in-law joke to similar effect.) But the film itself exists to perhaps contest that point, and in any case leaves just about any viewer more than satisfied.
Rear Window on ‘neighbourliness’
Things like intuition and creativity - in effect, heightened life - can give us direct experience of ‘freedom’. This idea of the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) helps illuminate several Hitchcock films, including Rear Window. In the film’s coda, as we listen to the song ‘Lisa’, freedom seems almost palpable for a moment, though the song’s lyrics hint that it may be just a dream. Significantly, the moment coincides with the meeting of Miss Lonely Hearts (Judith Evelyn) and The Composer (Ross Bagdasarian), the first time we’ve seen any such neighbourly interaction. Earlier, for just two or three shots, the film had attempted to raise our consciousness in another way. The episode of the strangled dog provokes the dog’s distraught owner to cry out to the other apartment dwellers, ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word “neighbour”.’ Here, the camera momentarily frees itself from Jeff’s apartment to show a wide view of the entire courtyard. Then, with separate close-ups, we get to meet Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy) and Miss Lonely Hearts - who suddenly are no longer just figures in Jeff’s (and our) fantasies. Instead, they appear to be perfectly normal, even rather plain, individuals.