© William Ahearn 2007


“Rear Window” could easily be dismissed
as one of Hitchcock’s false and fluffy Hollywood films. The entire film is shot on a massive (and somewhat unconvincing) set and in the first few minutes there is the unnecessary and silly appearance of a rear-projected helicopter that plays no role in the unfolding story. Instead of giving a sense of place – Greenwich Village in New York City – it just reinforces the notion that belief must be consciously suspended.


What saves this film for me is that it may be the best known movie made from the work of one of my favorite writers, Cornell Woolrich. Woolrich wrote the short story It Had to Be Murder that became “Rear Window” (and was renamed Rear Window after the success of the film) and it is typical of his work. In the story, L.B. Jeffries is stuck at the window or in bed but the reader doesn’t know why until the end of the story. The catch of the story is that Jeffries is stuck in a wheelchair. In Woolrich’s world, husbands killing and dismembering wives (or vice versa) is a given but why someone has been reduced to the role of a voyeur can be a mystery or a joke.


That element of the story obviously wouldn’t lend itself to film so the scriptwriter, John Michael Hayes (who also wrote the screenplays of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (remake), “The Trouble With Harry,” and “To Catch a Thief” for Hitchcock), fleshed out the story with various sub-plots and those additions made sense in the style of the writer. The class-crossing love story of Jeffries (James Stewart) and Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) is typical of Woolrich and the best example is in his short story, The Death Rose, a murder mystery that surrounds the relationship of a debutante and a police detective. The insurance nurse played by one of my favorite character actors, Thelma Ritter, who gained her crime film credits in “Pickup on South Street,” replaces Sam, the flunky in the story. The confrontation between Jeffries and Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) is typical of the genre and Woolrich used it often. In the work of Woolrich, someone knowing a police officer like Detective Thomas Doyle (Wendell Corey) (Doyle is named Boyne in the story) is typical although the police in Woolrich’s world function variously as sensitive souls or brutal sadists with no apparent pattern.


The rights to the story
and the subsequent film became a landmark US Supreme Court case regarding subsidiary copyrights. For more information, go here.


This is one of the few times that Hitchcock
stayed true to the source material (“Psycho” is another) and the result is that it’s one of his better films. What this film lacks is the noir sensibility of Woolrich but the only time Hitchcock ever got close to that was in “Shadow of a Doubt” and maybe “Strangers on a Train.”


What keeps “Rear Window” from being a really good film
is that contrived set that could never capture the urgency and realism of either New York City or Cornell Woolrich’s story. It’s not that Hitchcock never shot on-location. In creating the false set, Hitchcock added a level of fluff that ultimately betrays the urgency and reality of the story. The story isn’t about some globetrotting photojournalist and his uptown girlfriend. It’s a story about what could happen to any of us who – for whatever reason – is stuck looking out a window in a densely packed urban setting.


Hitchcock apologists are always quick to defend Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and the French filmmaker Francois Truffaut is perhaps the most vocal.


“In 1962,” Francois Truffaut wrote in his book about Hitchcock, “while in New York to present “Jules and Jim,” I noticed that every journalist asked me the same question” ‘Why do the critics of Cahiers du Cinema take Hitchcock so seriously? He’s rich and successful, but his movies have no substance.’ In the course of an interview during which I praised “Rear Window” to the skies, an American critic surprised me by commenting, ‘You love “Rear Window” because, as a stranger to New York, you know nothing about Greenwich Village.’ To this absurd statement, I replied, ‘”Rear Window” is not about Greenwich Village, it is a film about cinema, and I DO know cinema.’”


Truffaut may know cinema but he never understood cinema noir or roman noir and he demonstrated that unequivocally in “Shoot the Piano Player,” “The Bride Wore Black,” and “Mississippi Mermaid.” The last two of which were based on novels by Cornell Woolrich. Truffaut’s films may have mangled the form even more than “Rear Window.”


One of Hitchcock’s better films but severely over-rated.

 

williamahearn@yahoo.com