Through his rear window and the eye of his powerful camera he watched a great city tell on itself, expose its cheating ways...and Murder!
Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ (1954)
From Pop Horror
What does it mean to say that an artist has changed your life? It would mean that he or she, somehow with their art, permanently shifted your perception of the world. It’s a rare occurrence when this happens, and there are few artists throughout history who have been capable of achieving such a feat for me… and Alfred Hitchcock is one of them. I can safely say that the man changed my life. Hitchcock made me afraid to shower and afraid of heights, and with one particular film he made 65 years ago, he made me afraid of my neighbors.
It’s astonishing to think that Rear Window (1954) is as old as it is because it still holds up so well. Having recently revisited the film in preparation for this piece, I was surprised by how relevant and relatable the film remains. I think that sentiment speaks volumes about Hitchcock’s deep understanding of human beings and of how we think and behave. Like the rest of his films, Rear Window is a story about people and how they interact with one another in day-to-day life. Most of us have probably seen the film, but for those of us who are unfamiliar, I’ll sum things up. (when you’ve finished reading this, find it online and watch it immediately)
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12 Facts About Rear Window
From Mental Floss
REAR WINDOW'S ORIGINAL STORY DOESN'T INCLUDE LISA OR STELLA.
Rear Window was based on Cornell Woolrich's short story, “It Had to Be Murder.” In Woolrich’s version, the voyeuristic protagonist does not have a girlfriend or a nurse, although he does have a “day houseman” named Sam who checks in on him. Oh and his leg injury? It isn't explicitly mentioned until the very last line.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK WAS INSPIRED BY TWO ACTUAL MURDER CASES.
Although John Michael Hayes wrote the screenplay for the movie, Hitchcock helped with the actual crime at the center of the story. As he told François Truffaut, he lifted two news items from the British press: the 1910 case of Dr. Hawley Crippen and the 1924 case of Patrick Mohan. Crippen killed his wife, told friends she went to America, and then aroused suspicion by flaunting his secretary around town. Police later found body parts in the Crippen home and arrested the doctor for murder. (Some now believe Crippen was innocent.) Mohan also dismembered his pregnant girlfriend, throwing pieces of her body out a train window. But he didn’t know what to do with her head, and it was this gruesome detail that inspired Hitchcock to include a plot thread about digging up the neighbors’ flower bed for evidence.
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How Rear Window Made Us All Voyeurs And Detectives
From Deadspin
Rear Window is more than one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest comedies of terrors. Set in a Greenwich Village apartment and its adjoining courtyards, this urban variation on the backyard-murder story is a once-over-lightly satire of the quality of modern life and a once-over-thoroughly exploration of the allure of voyeurism. Always a Hitchcock personal favorite, Rear Window (like Vertigo, The Trouble With Harry, the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Rope) was owned outright by the director; and since he wanted these films’ theatrical value to appreciate over the years, he made sure they would not get thrown into the dustbin of TV syndication. Only after his death, in 1980, did the Hitchcock estate negotiate for a re-release. And the 21-year hiatus after Rear Window’s last public screening prevented it from taking its proper place in film history—not merely as the predecessor to such search-and-destroy melodramas as John Carpenter’s Someone Is Watching Me! but also as the inspiration for such inquiries into perceptual truth as Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Coppola’s The Conversation, and Brian DePalma’s Blow Out. Still, the movie couldn’t have returned at a better time. DePalma aside, the decade preceding Rear Window’s return has been a horrible one for suspense movies—too many potential thrill masters have succumbed to cheap tricks. The notion of suspense not as shock but as a heightening of the essential narrative question “What’s gonna happen next?” has gone right out the window. It comes back through Rear Window: the best thriller of 1954 becomes the best thriller in 1983.
Often condemned during its first release as a celebration of the peeping Tom, this movie is actually a rigorously structured morality play. It revolves around the apartment of L. B. Jeffries, nicknamed Jeff (James Stewart), a photojournalist laid up in a wheelchair with injuries he received while shooting the Indianapolis 500. To get his mind off the pain, the summer heat, and his troubled romance with gorgeous fashion plate Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), he takes to looking out the window (eventually using his camera as a telescope) and immersing himself in the lives of his neighbors. The joke lies in how Jeff confronts the mélange of sights and sounds in his own Village backyard—from a hefty female sculptor chiseling a figure with a hole in place of its stomach (she calls it “Hunger”) and an unemployed composer battling the piano keys to such sitcom types as the ravenous newlyweds or the childless couple pampering the family dog. Then there’s the hubbub of the boulevard beyond, which he can glimpse through an alleyway. It’s a typically congested, modern middle-class environment—and Hitchcock makes us understand how city dwellers grow to see their neighbors as just part of the world’s clutter.
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