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| James Stewart in Rear Window (1954) |
[SPOILER ALERT!] A man who makes his living closely observing the world as a photographer finds himself wheelchair-bound in his apartment with nothing better to keep boredom away than voyeurism. With his windows and blinds open, he trains his eyes and ears on the world of his neighbors—the composer, the couple with the dog, Miss Lonelyhearts, Miss Torso, the salesman and his wife, the artist, and the newlyweds. What he sees and hears leads him to conclude that one of those neighbors is a murderer. [END SPOILER ALERT]
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| Grace Kelly |
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| Wendell Corey |
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| Kelly and Stewart |
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| Thelma Ritter and Stewart |
Woolrich was a prolific noir fiction writer, publishing dozens of novels and hundreds of stories during his long career. He garnered early success in his hometown of New York writing and publishing six jazz age novels between 1926 and 1932. After winning a $10,000 writing contest sponsored by First National Pictures he abruptly took a job at First National in Hollywood writing screenplays, or trying to write them. Within two years he returned to New York and began to write pulp noir fiction.
Despite accumulating wealth as a writer, he lived with his mother for 25 years in a series of seedy hotels, mingling with prostitutes, thieves, killers, and other lowlifes. From the time of his mother's death in 1957 until his own death in 1968, however, he lived in more civilized lodgings on the upper west side and mingled with his colleagues and young admirers in the unofficial New York hangouts of the Mystery Writers of America.
Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart formed a partnership in 1953 and bought the rights to "It Had to Be Murder" to make this film.
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John Michael Hayes was Alfred Hitchcock's favorite screenwriter, until he wasn't. Rear Window was their first film together.
The Woolrich story has no romantic subplot, and Jeff's disability isn't revealed until the last paragraph. Hayes made these two storylines prominent in his screenplay.
He also took this dialogue from "It Had to Be Murder"—
Did any of them see her leave, according to your man? … Then all you've gotten is a second-hand version of an unsupported statement by him. Not an eyewitness account.
—and turned it into this:
Well, what good's his information? It's a second-hand version of an unsupported story by the murderer himself—Thorwald. Now, did anybody actually see the wife get on the train?
He took the insipid character of Sam in Woolrich's story and created a funny and insightful replacement, Stella, the insurance company nurse. He then split the sounding-board duties between Stella and Jeff's romantic partner played by Grace Kelly.
Hayes continued his successful collaboration with Hitchcock on To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). But something fell apart between them after Hayes had written The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Hitchcock decided to leave Hayes's name off the credits and give another writer, Angus MacPhail—who had contributed some minor help early on—full credit for the screenplay. Hayes took Hitchcock to arbitration, won his case, and his name replaced MacPhail's as the sole screenwriter. Thus Hayes's relationship with Alfred Hitchcock came to a bitter end.
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Rear Window was one of the "Five Lost Hitchcocks," so-called, because after their theatrical releases the director bought back each movie's rights. For three decades the films were tied up, first by Hitchcockian fiat and then, after his death, by litigation over re-distribution rights. The other four films were Rope (1948), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958). They all became available for re-distribution in 1984.
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The film was shot on an enormous set at Paramount Pictures built specially for Rear Window. It took fifty workers two months to build it at a cost of $100,000 ($2.2 million in 2023). It was four stories high and contained thirty-one apartments, including twelve that were fully furnished. Georgine Darcy—"Miss Torso"—lived in her character's apartment during the filming.
The courtyard was constructed in what had been the studio basement before a crew excavated and prepped it for this movie. Jeff's second-story apartment was actually on street level in the real world.
The set was a legend in its own time and was the object of an unusually high number of visitors to a Hitchcock set as well as the object of photo spreads in several magazines, including LIFE, while the movie was being shot. Hitchcock kept his base of operations inside Jeff's apartment throughout the filming, and he communicated with the actors in the other apartments via radio-frequency transmission to earpieces they wore.
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Rear Window was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Director, Screenplay, Cinematography, and Sound. It ranks at number 48 on the American Film Institute's list of 100 Greatest Films, number 53 on the British Film Institute's 2012 list of the 100 Greatest Films, and number 8 on My 25 Favorite Movies list.
