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| Rear Window (1954) | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Background
This film masterpiece was made entirely on one confined set built at Paramount Studios - a realistic courtyard composed of 32 apartments (12 completely furnished) - at a non-existent address in Manhattan (125 W. 9th Street). Each of the tenants of the other apartments offer an observant comment of marriage and a complete survey of male/female relationships (all the way from honeymooners to a murderous spouse), as the main protagonist watches / spies / spectates through his 'rear window' on them. Remarkably, the camera angles are largely from the protagonist's own apartment, so the film viewer (in a dark theatre) sees the inhabitants of the other apartments almost entirely from his point of view - to share in his voyeuristic surveillance. Concurrent with the crime-thriller theme of mysterious activities of apartment neighbors is the struggle of the passively-observant and immobile protagonist (James Stewart), a magazine photographer who is impotently confined to a wheelchair while recuperating in his Greenwich Village apartment and fearful of the imprisoning effects of marriage. He struggles, as he does with his plaster cast, to overcome his noncommittal feelings and reluctance to get married to his high-fashion model fiancee-girlfriend (Grace Kelly). In the midst of the most tense situation in another context, she daringly flashes a wedding ring to him to clue him in with the 'evidence.' This film - one of Hitchcock's greatest thrillers, especially in its final twenty minutes, received only four Academy Award nominations (with no Oscars): Best Director, Best Screenplay (John Michael Hayes), Best Color Cinematography (Robert Burks), and Best Sound Recording. Un-nominated for her erotically-charged performance in this film as a rich society woman, the glowingly-beautiful Grace Kelly won the Best Actress Oscar in the same year for her deglamourized role in The Country Girl (1954). This was her second of three films for Hitchcock (she had already made Dial M for Murder (1954) and would next star in To Catch a Thief (1955)), before leaving acting in 1956 to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco. And this was Stewart's second of four appearances for Hitchcock (he had already starred in Rope (1948), and would go on to be featured in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Vertigo (1958)). In brief, the protagonist and some of the neighboring characters (with the hero's manufactured names) in the courtyard apartments are:
Two other characters include Jeff's grouchy, caustic masseuse Stella McCaffery (Thelma Ritter) from the insurance company, and a disbelieving cop Thomas J. Doyle (Wendell Corey), Jeff's old war-time buddy. Many films have paid homage to Hitchcock's masterpiece, including Roman Polanski's The Tenant (1976, Fr.), and Brian de Palma's erotic thriller Body Double (1984). The StoryUnderneath the credits, jazz music plays as the bamboo shades rise slowly over four vertically-rectangular windows in a small Greenwich Village apartment. The camera tracks out through the windows, showing the surrounding Lower East Side apartment buildings, lower courtyard and garden. A camera pan follows a meowing cat up a wide set of steps in the foreground of the courtyard, and then keeps moving up to a wide pan of almost the entire complex. Tracking back into the open apartment window, the occupant is asleep, sweating profusely. It is 94 degrees on the thermometer - during a heat wave. Next door in the adjacent loft (of a composer), a radio blares a commercial as its lathered-up occupant shaves:
He stops shaving and tunes the radio to a music station. Then, the camera begins a continuous, almost two minute long panning camera movement. Across the way, an older couple are sleeping on an outside fire escape, curiously head to foot, to escape the intense heat. They stir when their alarm sounds, and below them, an athletic, scantily-clad blonde woman puts on a pink top and suggestively exercises while doing her chores, giving a dancers'-like kick high into the air. Life is beginning to stir. The camera returns to the apartment where it slowly reveals that the man is immobilized. He is alone and confined in a wheelchair. His left leg is in a cast - already inscribed:
The camera proceeds to explore L. B. ("Jeff") Jefferies' (James Stewart) second-floor apartment, giving silent clues to his occupation. On the wall are enlarged photos - he is a professional magazine photographer and world-traveler, documenting wars, dangerous sports, racing accidents and other catastrophes, accustomed to paparazzi-style behavior and nosing into other peoples' affairs:
When his editor calls on the phone, he sees two females on the roof terrace across the way crouch down behind the wall to nude sunbathe - they take off their pajamas. A low-flying helicopter soon approaches to spy on the women. Jeff also observes his neighbors' activities outside his window, especially the dancer who attracts his prurient interest, especially when she wiggles her behind. It is learned that seven weeks earlier, he sustained his fractured-leg injury in a crash while he was photographing a car race from the middle of the track to get a "dramatic" photo. The cast will come off a week later: "Next Wednesday I emerge from this plaster cocoon." Incapacitated and bored, he spends his time staring out the window watching (prying on) his neighbors through the windows of the apartments on the opposite side of the complex's courtyard. Between the side/rear walls of the apartment buildings is a narrow alleyway leading to the street. [The frames of the windows in the apartments across the way are similar to the individual frames of a strip of cinematic film, and Jeff - as a film director might - derives pleasure from 'film-viewing' the dramas that unfold in peoples' lives. At opposite ends of the courtyard are two artists, one a young piano player/composer of songs (symbolic of sounds), the other a middle-aged modernist sculptress (symbolic of images) - these two correspond to the two main components of a film.] Because he has been incapacitated for six weeks, he will miss a photo assignment in Kashmir. Jeff begs his editor to get him back on the job:
Paralleling his conversation about the difficulties of marriage (more boredom, nagging and oppressiveness), he views a heavy set, grouchy neighbor Thorwald (Raymond Burr) in the opposite apartment return home from work (framed in one window) and argue with his blonde-haired, nagging, sick, negligee-clad wife lying in bed (symbolically separated by being framed in the next smaller, more claustrophic bedroom window). [Is she arguing with him because she suspects that he is cheating on her?] To scratch an itch he feels inside his cast, Jeff takes a long Chinese back-scratcher and carefully threads it down inside his cast and relieves the aggravating feeling. [There is the implication of sexual stimulation for the sexually-repressed Jeff.] His sharp-tongued, visiting nurse-therapist Stella (Thelma Ritter), sent by his insurance company, arrives to give him a massage. She scolds and disapproves of him (and the society as a whole "race of Peeping Toms") for his principal pasttime - voyeurism. She condemns him for being more interested in other people's lives than his own, after reminding him that Peeping Toms used to be punished with blindness - she also asks a sexually-charged, euphemistic question about a "red-hot poker":
As she takes his temperature and prepares to set up a bed for his massage, Stella warns that his voyeurism will only lead to trouble. She also notes his sexual impotence by noting that he must have a "hormone deficiency" because "those bathing beauties you've been watching haven't raised [his thermometer] temperature one degree." He claims he would welcome a little "trouble." With solidly-rooted, home-spun common sense, she also cautions about his lack of roots and commitment, his sidestepping of marriage and his lukewarm attitude toward his girlfriend/fashion model Lisa Carol Fremont (Grace Kelly) - she insists that there must be something wrong with him to reject Lisa's attention:
He confesses that Lisa is too much of a "Park Avenue" woman - too rich, "too perfect," spoiled, sophisticated and incompatible for his lifestyle as a globe-trotting, high-risk, ultra-masculine photographer. According to him, her different interests include "expensive restaurants," "a new dress," a "lobster dinner," and "the latest scandal". Stella also highlights one of the film major themes - that Jeff's hyperactive imagination will cause him a LOT of trouble:
Across the apartment complex, Jeff sees a newlywed couple move in - the Newlyweds. The bridegroom completes their marital ritual by carrying his bride across the threshold. They kiss, and then close the blind for privacy. A calliope rendition of the romantic ballad "That's Amore" plays in the background. [They are the only ones in the film who close their shades.] Stella accuses Jeff of being a "window shopper" before leaving. Later during a reddish Manhattan sunset as Jeff dozes, the courtyard is buzzing with activity - the soprano practices her scales. A shadow [suggesting the negative image on Jeff's table] slowly rises up Jeff's face as Lisa (in close-up) approaches, bends over, and then lovingly kisses him. She rouses and awakens him from his sleep. She is a stylish vision of beauty [recalling the positive image on the cover of the magazine] - an elegant, lovely, affluent, blonde, fashion-model-designer girlfriend. They whisper to each other, as she asks him about his leg, his stomach, and his "love life." When she asks, "anything else bothering you?," he responds impolitely: "Who are you?" To answer his inquiry, she introduces herself by performing in front of him while glamorously dressed in a $1,100 haute-couture gown. Used to being looked at by complete strangers, she poses as an exhibitionist in her new, fashionable and expensive Parisian dress. [She desperately tries to distract him from the enticements and attractions of his subjects across the courtyard through his window, although he has predicted her interests correctly - she has "a new dress and a lobster dinner." However, she did not pay for the dress (it was given to her gratis as a model/fashion columnist), and she prepared the catered lobster dinner herself - she was not the pampered, spoiled woman that Jeff had characterized. And she would later indulge in danger and daring, life-threatening acts which Jeff believed that he was solely capable of performing as a freelance, globetrotting photographer.]:
Although he thinks it's only a "run-of-the-mill Wednesday," she expects it will be a "big night":
She finds an old and worn cigarette box in his apartment, commenting: "It's seen better days...it's cracked and you never use it. It's too ornate. I'm sending up a plain flat silver one with just your initials engraved." He objects to her spending her "hard-earned money" on such things. She opens the door to a uniformed, red-coated waiter from the Twenty-One Club who delivers their lobster dinner and an ice bucket that she has catered. Jeff is unable to pop the cork (both a phallic reference and a marriage reference) so the waiter accomplishes the task -- more symbolism of Jeff's impotence. She promises him: "I'm going to make this a week you'll never forget." While drinking the wine before dinner, she tells Jeff about her busy work day - a sales meeting, appointments with wealthy notables, luncheon with Harper's Bazaar people, two fall fashion showings twenty blocks apart - and then a favor that she did for him with her connections. To keep him in New York shooting fashion photography instead of adventurous assignments overseas, she "planted three nice items in the columns" for him for publicity, to get him a lucrative contract in the local fashion industry. But Jeff snubs her offer - believing that his own lifestyle suits him best. He notes how her contrasting lifestyle clashes with his. He ultimately rejects the new image and identity she has planned and publicized for him:
To escape from their romantic tensions, Jeff turns to the window again, while she walks away to get dinner ready. Jeff's neighbors are only known by the names he assigns to them. Across the apartments in Jeff's view, a lonely, middle-aged spinster (Judith Evelyn), dubbed 'Miss Lonelyhearts,' sets a table for two, putting a bottle of wine on the table and lighting the candles. She fantasizes a gentleman caller's entrance and pantomimes his arrival. She ushers him to the table, and then toasts. [In a parallel to the scene in 'Miss Lonelyhearts' apartment, Lisa prepares their wine and food in the background. He is involved with his own voyeuristic view of other people's lives rather than with Lisa. With his back to Lisa, Jeff raises his glass in a toast to 'Miss Lonelyhearts.' His gesture is unanswered - it is symbolic of his own loneliness, his inability to commit, and his emotional distance from Lisa.] During her entertainment of a phantom lover, Bing Crosby's To See You Is To Love You is heard, ironically, from the radio in a neighbor's apartment. The woman sadly buries her head in her hands at the table, as Lisa returns and joins him to watch and sympathize:
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Rear
Window (1954) is an intriguing, brilliant, macabre Hitchcockian
visual study of obsessive human curiosity and voyeurism. John Michael
Hayes' screenplay was based on Cornell Woolrich's (with pen-name
William Irish) original 1942 short story or novelette, It Had
to Be Murder.