‘Rear Window’ exposes lots of negatives of a curious romance
The law protects privacy. If you walk along a busy street, there is generally no expectation of privacy. In your home, there is. But there are limits to that protection. If someone outside your home inadvertently sees you in your underwear, they’re not going to be fined or thrown in jail just for looking. It may be uncouth. It’s not really policeable. There’s some kind of unofficial “fair game” concept we abide by.
Critics say that looking into our neighbors’ private moments is the fascination of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” — except what happens in our neighbors’ homes really isn’t all that interesting. The story that inspired “Rear Window” is one of gut instinct. Defending your beliefs when people around you are cartoonishly indifferent. Someone who has little else to do but look into neighbors’ apartments is convinced that something bad has happened in one of them — but the authorities don’t believe him.
Hitchcock likes that angle. But he’s got bigger ideas — a message about confinement.
“Rear Window” is an informative movie. It is not particularly satisfying to watch. Its subtext is probably overstated. It’s not even very serious. Roger Ebert said it was “intended as entertainment” but is now regarded as art.
It is based on a 1942 short story by Cornell Woolrich, “It Had to Be Murder.” Woolrich was said to be compared with Fitzgerald but became most successful writing pulp fiction. Many of the events in “Rear Window” are faithful to his tale, but in Hitchcock’s hands, the characters differ significantly enough to make Woolrich’s work merely the story within the story.
In “It Had to Be Murder,” Jeff is assisted by a “day houseman.” In the movie, he is assisted by Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter, who will supply the same kind of girlfriend/mother influences that Hitchcock would also use a decade later in “The Birds.” (Ritter, as nurse Stella, physically resembles Jessica Tandy’s “Birds” character, though their enthusiasm for what the man should do will differ greatly.)
Just as in “The Birds” and “North by Northwest,” the women will find themselves in greater danger than the male hero. An even stronger parallel is to another later Hitchcock work, “Vertigo,” in which a pretty and interesting woman practically throws herself at Jimmy Stewart, but he may not love her back, as he’s immersed in a woman’s murder and is dealing with an injury that has sapped his manhood. The high drama in “Rear Window” is not the whodunit, but whether Jeff will somehow reject Helen of Troy, a drama left unresolved.
Woolrich did not write the script for “Rear Window” — that was John Michael Hayes, a Hitchcock collaborator on four films. In June 1984, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Hayes explained it this way: “We wanted to make a very English kind of picture, full of understatement. The idea was to take a bizarre situation and observe people behaving toward it as if it were completely normal. I considered it silly and fun.”
Indeed, “Rear Window” waters down the famous Hitchcock suspense with a cheery tone from the opening score. Around the 40-minute mark, there is opera music playing during this conversation that sounds, in places, a bit like the “Star Trek” theme. There are grim events happening here outweighed by the excitement of discovery.
Is there a message in “Rear Window” about bystander reluctance to step in to troubling situations, that perhaps we mind our own business too much? Maybe. It was made a full decade before the Kitty Genovese tragedy (which wasn’t too far away, in Queens). Social scientists can probably point to numerous valid reasons why people don’t, or shouldn’t, get involved. That is too much of a gray area for this film.
Hayes says Hitchcock asked him to talk with Kelly; he found her a “lovely girl with humor and wit but who was on fire inside.” He describes the romantic drama between Jeff and Lisa as an internal struggle of hers, over authenticity: “She’s a real person, and she wants Stewart to know that, but he thinks she’s just a superficial society type. The more she becomes involved in solving this murder, the more he begins to recognize that she’s not just a magazine cover, that she can live the way he lives.”
That may be wishful thinking. She is a supporting character. “Rear Window” is undeniably about a man’s problem, a mid-life crisis. Stewart was 21 years older than Kelly. Life is actually being too good to Jeff, but he seems to prefer otherwise. The issue that viewers are handed is not about what happens in other apartments, but why this astoundingly lucky guy is disappointing a perfect “10” with his lack of commitment, or even interest. Among the film’s shortcomings is that it picks up the “romance” mid-stream; we don’t know how they met or why she’s so attracted to him. “Rear Window” will flirt with being a farce about a woman trying to win over a reluctant man who’s not even close to her league.
Lisa is from the world of high fashion; Jeff’s a war photographer. Jeff either has inferiority issues and/or commitment issues, as well as some implied concerns about how well his body may function once he’s out of his cast. He claims to see their lifestyles as incompatible and either/or. Why not just break it off with her? She makes him dinner, and he comments, unenthusiastically, “It’s perfect ... as always.” He protests that he works in rugged environments, sometimes in bitter cold with limited or no food. “You’re not meant for that kind of a life. Few people are,” he declares, and she concludes, “So that’s it. You won’t stay here, and I can’t go with you.”
The short stories behind both “Rear Window” and “The Birds” provide Hitchcock with groundbreaking cinematic ideas. The latter choreographs swarms of birds on an island. “Rear Window” is a much different visual, a set piece of a static brick wall with small windows into numerous mini-dramas, almost like a painting or “polyptych” type of work. The households are apparently unrelated but gradually become sort of a collection of our frustrations at home. “Rear Window” has the feel of material that was originally a stage play, though it’s not; that would be a challenge for the visual depth.
One of the oddities — or perhaps missed opportunities — of “Rear Window” is that Jeff’s photography has little to do with cracking the case. In fact, Jeff’s profession almost has nothing to do with this movie, although, despite protestations, it’s a glamourous profession with cultural cachet, and seeing Jeff hold a pricey camera is much less tacky than seeing him hold binoculars; it’s as if he has some license to be doing what he’s doing. But the binoculars are really all anyone needs here to maybe put two and two together. Jeff does unearth a clue from his still photos, but by that point, his trio are already headlong into their suspicions. That’s in contrast with what would become an occasional movie/TV device — a snapshot catching something important by accident, such as in Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” and even in an episode of “The Brady Bunch.” It’s a hook used in Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans.”
In his courtyard, Hitchcock misses his chance to do Altman-like talk-overs, but he gets a seven-decade jump on “Barbie.” With only a couple exceptions, all of these people in this panorama are oblivious to each other and never interact. They are almost like figures in dollhouses, stationed to provide some sort of sketches of everyday life. There is no cinema verite here, no type of “Gilligan’s Island” experiment in which people of differing demographics try to coexist with each other. In a Jacques Tati film, these same characters would struggle comically in their units with modern gadgetry; in “Rear Window,” they are here to bare ... not souls ... but their daily unfulfillment.
Because nothing occurs outside of the courtyard, “Rear Window” is a greater cinematic challenge than “The Birds.” When he’s not showing the neighbors, Hitchcock is turning the camera on Jeff, for extended speeches, even during moments of awkwardly extended intimacy.
But Hitch does wonders with the setting he’s got. The credits are shown as three columns of blinds gradually roll up and reveal the curtain going up on Jeff’s own little theater. There is tons of brick, and a little concrete, a little metal and a little wood in this environment; it’s not very green, and even the nicely kept flowerbed feels crammed and out of place, a desperate yearning for a real yard and space. When Hitchcock zeroes in on the apartments, the bricks provide framing, none more thick and austere as when he is showing the Thorwalds’ unit. Hayes credits Hitchcock for the lit cigarette in the dark unit. The courtyard setting veers between cozy and claustrophobic. Few secrets can be kept here. Jeff is anchored here by his injury. Is “Rear Window” trying to tell us that we’re all trapped in a prison? Maybe that our natural curiosities are going to run their course, even when we’re constrained.
The people in the other units are all white and apparently middle class. We can tell we’re in a big city by the dialogue and the hustle and bustle; it’s the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan. No one has air conditioning. Jeff’s unit has shelves of books, a typical movie sign of the highly educated, but other apartments have few if any. Several situations take place around fire escapes, which are often used in movies to depict lower-income lifestyles (“Rocky,” “Pretty Woman”) or police activity. Many of the apartment vignettes involve women dealing with men, or trying to. Hayes tells the Chicago Tribune that the couplings are not a commentary on different stages of relationships: “Those characters were all storytelling devices, not instruments of a larger underlying theme.”
The 2022 film “Babylon” depicts Hollywood performers, even in the early days, as people who simply can’t ever turn it off, performing drama in everyday situations. “Rear Window” also indicates that humans have trouble leaving their jobs at the office. A dancer relentlessly practices in her kitchen; a composer bangs away at his living-room piano; a skeptical cop friend nevertheless agrees to investigate Jeff’s suspicions on the side. Jeff can’t keep his camera down. He’s a photographer with a nose for news. His obsession with Lars Thorwald is not seedy voyeurism but professional instinct.
Because of its staid surroundings, most of the suspense in “Rear Window” will occur within trusted cinematic devices: characters visiting enemy turf and needing to leave just before dangerous people arrive; people trying to avoid being seen while watching someone else; people possibly being falsely accused; a man dangling from a ledge. Somehow, in Hitchcock’s hands, these instances feel special, not cliché.
“Rear Window” played in late summer and autumn of 1954, well before the heyday of Pauline Kael, who wasn’t the biggest Hitchcock fan. Unlike some of his other ’50s works, she hardly mentions it in later writings. It also played well before the emergence of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. In a 1983 episode of their TV show featuring several Hitchcock works, Siskel called “Rear Window” a “marvelously entertaining” film but also a “serious piece of art.” He detects a deeper message in all those apartment windows than Hayes concedes: “We see people in all sorts of situations because they’re not in love.” (In fact, that’s the situation Jeff and Lisa find themselves in.) “Quite a powerful statement,” Siskel says.
Ebert in that program mentions the Hitchcock motif of the “cool, icy blonde.” Much later, Ebert, in a 2000 review on his Great Movies portal, writes that the “level of danger and suspense is so far elevated” by Hitchcock that “Rear Window” was “intended as entertainment in 1954” but “is now revealed as art.”
Actually, in 1954, it might’ve been viewed as too much art and not enough entertainment. “Rear Window” did pick up four Oscar nominations, for Hitchcock and Hayes as well as cinematography and sound, but won none. Ritter entered the “Rear Window” production sort of red-hot — she had received Oscar nominations four times in the previous four years. She would go on to receive two nore, not for “Rear Window.” Kelly did not receive an Oscar nomination for “Rear Window” either but somehow managed to win the statue that same year for a different film, “The Country Girl.” Stewart was past his awards prime but would collect five nominations in his career with one win; none here. So we have an acting trio with 13 career Oscar nominations in a movie often placed on Top-100 lists, and none of them received an Academy Award nomination for it.
Stewart and Kelly were Hitchcock regulars. Ritter was not but evidently would’ve been glad to be. She gushed about the director in August 1954, saying she was having trouble with important dialogue and was aware she was costing the production time, and all Hitchcock told her was “Just remember, this is only a motion picture!” Ritter, as the “insurance company nurse,” will play the Reliable Observer — she opines early, “We’ve become a race of peeping toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.” Around the 90-minute mark, as the trio speculates where Mrs. Thorwald might be, Stella will opine that “she’s scattered all over town, leg in the East River,” a location later confirmed by police.
Voyeurism occurs in far more movies than you might think. Mostly, it’s to spy on a girl. “Back to the Future,” for example, or “My Bodyguard.” It happens in “Porky’s.” Jack Nicholson sneaks around to take pictures of what he thinks is a cheating husband in “Chinatown.” In “10,” it’s quite blatant. Dudley Moore’s George is looking into neighbors’ windows not with binoculars but a telescope. Not star-gazing, but sex-gazing. The message there is not all that different from that of “Rear Window” — George has become bored with his significant other and is in a mid-life crisis and envies the younger crowd and their perfect bodies, and this is how he’s getting his minimal excitement. In “10,” voyeuring is so common among these jaded Hollywood types, it’s not even an embarrassment — neighbors who realize they’re being watched simply point their own telescope back at the offender.
Hayes in 1984 is asked whether “Rear Window” is a “commentary on the dangers of man’s voyeuristic nature.” Hayes says no: “I can tell you for sure that it wasn’t my intention — or Hitch’s, as far as I know — to present any kind of thematic exploration of voyeurism. We were telling a story.” He describes Jeff as simply “an average man stuck in a wheelchair” who is bound to notice what people are doing in lit-up rooms across the courtyard.
But maybe Hitchcock is trying to sell us on the idea that perhaps Jeff’s window-gazing interest is sexually motivated. Nowadays, Jeff’s low level of sexual interest would raise implications of homosexuality, but this is 1954, and no one perceives the film as having such implications. In the opening phone call, Jeff threatens his boss with the prospect of doing something “drastic” like getting married, then mocks what he perceives as marriage boredom. His boss says “You know best,” though Jeff doesn’t mention any exes and moments later he confides to his nurse, “I’m not ready for marriage,” suggesting he hasn’t been married; he’s a middle-age character who sounds like he’s 22. Also because it’s 1954, Hitchcock cannot get away with the topless scenes of Blake Edwards in “10.” He comes close, in the first three minutes, when Miss Torso is attempting to put on a bra, fails, bends over, tries again, and succeeds ... and only then turns to face the window. Does Miss Torso get more screen time than Mr. Piano Player? We can tell which kind of voyeur experience Hitchcock finds the most interesting.
For much of the movie, Jeff is observing the other apartments unaided — no glasses or binoculars or lenses. It’s hard to believe he could see with the naked eye the same kind of detail we see in Hitchcock’s tight shots, but that is artistic license. In the 40th minute, Jeff grabs binoculars to see Lars put jewelry in a suitcase. He will escalate to his camera, not for acquiring photographic evidence but just for a better view. When Lisa sees him grab binoculars, she calls it “diseased.” The camerawork implies that Jeff is looking in on Miss Torso, but not specifically when she is dressing/undressing. Gradually, he will use his camera more than the binoculars, apparently for a sharper look.
A hobbyist in 2024 discovered that Jeff’s camera is a mid-1950s Exakta VX 35mm SLR made by Ihagee of Dresden, East Germany. The name “Exakta” appears prominently and elegantly on the camera, except in the movie, Hitchcock covered it. The lens is by Kilfitt of Munich, 400mm f/5.6.
It might be fair to call “Rear Window” a tragedy, that human beings have so much difficulty pairing up that even when it’s someone who’s perfect, we can’t do it. Jeff never once seems excited that Lisa has come by. Yet he says he wants the “status quo,” his iffy commitment that keeps drawing her back. Before she appears, Jeff has given her a huge buildup to his nurse, who agrees with him and more. When Kelly appears, around the 16th minute, she does not disappoint, even if his reaction does.
However addressed in this film, voyeurism is a hopeless conundrum for human beings. If a man is presented with the opportunity to secretly view a woman in less than normal clothing, what is the correct response? If he stares, he may be tacky, sleazy or despicable. If he turns away, it may signal he is not interested. Reactions to the male’s response seem to vary by age — should they? A teenager staring at Miss Torso would likely get less of a reprimand than Jeff.
“Vertigo” is an incredibly cynical film. “Rear Window” might match it. Among the things “Rear Window” could be telling us: We can’t stop looking at our neighbors; our neighbors live unfulfilling lives, our suspicions about people are true; we’re far more interested in gossip than astrophysics; we’re prisoners to our own shortcomings; we can’t make somebody love us. Jeff’s most alarming statement is about marriage, that it’s not about the start of a new life together but the end of freedom for one of them; that we’re never really going to be in love. He is a person of great intuition who seems to think she and he are not right for each other. What if he’s right?
3 stars
(December 2024)
“Rear Window” (1954)
Starring
James Stewart as L.B. Jefferies ♦
Grace Kelly as Lisa Fremont ♦
Wendell Corey as Tom Doyle ♦
Thelma Ritter as Stella ♦
Raymond Burr as Lars Thorwald ♦
Judith Evelyn as Miss Lonelyhearts ♦
Ross Bagdasarian as Songwriter ♦
Georgine Darcy as Miss Torso ♦
Sara Berner as Woman on Fire Escape ♦
Frank Cady as Man on Fire Escape ♦
Jesslyn Fax as Miss Hearing Aid ♦
Rand Harper as Newlywed ♦
Irene Winston as Emma Thorwald ♦
Havis Davenport as Newlywed
Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Written by: John Michael Hayes (screenplay)
Written by: Cornell Woolrich (story)
Music: Franz Waxman
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Editing: George Tomasini
Art direction: Joseph MacMillan Johnson, Hal Pereira
Set decoration: Sam Comer, Ray Moyer
Makeup: Wally Westmore
