Rear Window (Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, Patron, Paramount, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 20) I went back to one of my former patterns and did a three-film marathon on Turner Classic Movies, starting with one of their double bills, co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and African-American actor Colman Domingo (who achieved sudden stardom with his incandescent villain portrayal of Michael Jackson’s father, Joe Jackson, in the recent Michael biopic). The two films Domingo chose to pair were Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window (1954) and Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973). He made a rather forced attempt to link the two and also made the bizarre argument that Rear Window is a dream of the James Stewart character and everybody else in the movie is just a figment of his imagination. That struck me as frankly ridiculous, though as a forced re-reading of a major film it’s along the lines of the re-reading of Edgar G. Ulmer’s vest-pocket masterpiece Detour (1946) to indicate that Tom Neal’s character really is a double murderer and his flashback proclaiming his innocence is just a lie. Rear Window, one of my all-time favorite films (and one which should have been listed in The Film Noir Encyclopedia: the editors included four Hitchcocks, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, and The Wrong Man, and they omitted Rear Window and Vertigo I suspect just because they were in color), is a surprisingly timely tale about voyeurism that if anything is more relevant in today’s social-media age in which ordinary people post scads of information about themselves online and other ordinary people absorb it all and all too often obsess about it.

Rear Window started life as a short story by Cornell Woolrich, one of the major noir writers (and a closeted Gay man whose wife left him and had their marriage annulled after she discovered his diary, in which he’d written detailed accounts of his sexual adventures with male sailors he’d picked up), though he signed the story under his pseudonym “William Irish.” (That’s how the edition of the story I read was signed, though both the film’s credits and the original poster art listed him as “Cornell Woolrich.” Also, according to the film’s Wikipedia page, the original 1942 publication of the story in the pulp Dime Detective was called “It Had to Be Murder,” but the edition I read used the same title as the film.) Both the story and the film are about a news photographer named L. B. Jefferies (James Stewart) who was hit by a racing car during an auto race he was shooting for a carefully unnamed magazine that is pretty obviously Life and has been stranded with a broken leg for six weeks. To relieve the boredom he’s started looking through the windows of his New York apartment building and studying his neighbors, among whom are aspiring ballet dancer “Miss Torso” (Georgine Darcy); a songwriter (Ross Bagdasarian, who later would start making novelty records under the name “David Seville” and create Alvin and the Chipmunks); the desperately single “Miss Lonelyhearts” (Judith Evelyn), who primps for dates with men who never show up; a couple (Frank Cady and Sara Berner) who decide to sleep on the fire escape to get out from under the heat of a New York summer until a sudden rainstorm forces them to relocate indoors; a newlywed couple (Rand Harper and Havis Davenport) who hurriedly draw their window shades when they realize Jefferies is spying on them; and the piece’s central villain, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), whose invalid wife Emma (Irene Winston) suddenly disappears midway through the film. Jefferies and his caregiver, insurance company nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), become convinced that Lars murdered Emma and is sneaking her body out of his apartment piece by piece.

Hitchcock and his writer, John Michael Hayes, made two major changes in the story: they added the character of Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly in the second of her three Hitchcock films; as I’ve noted before, though Hitchcock was never known as an actors’ director he got Kelly to look sensual and alluring whereas in all her other films she’s so icy she could have sunk the Titanic) as a girlfriend for Jefferies. Also in Woolrich’s original story Lars is concealing the dismembered bits of his wife’s body by laying a split-level floor in his apartment and inserting them into the poured concrete. Rear Window seen today is a finely honed masterpiece by a great director working at the peak of his powers, and Stella’s comments condemning Jefferies’s voyeurism – “In the old days, they'd put your eyes out with a red hot poker” and “What people ought to do is get outside and look in for a change” – ring even truer in today’s Internet-driven social-media age. One of the most interesting things about it is that it’s, among other things, a film about the miscommunications that hamper human relationships. Jefferies and Lisa are hamstrung because she’s a society girl who isn’t used to the kind of roughing-it lifestyle he’s lived and also she’s “too perfect” for him. She enters wearing a fancy dress we’re told costs $1,100 – in 1954 money! – and appears to have the same sort of job Ginger Rogers had in Top Hat, wearing borrowed clothes to promote them and get other women to buy them. Ross Bagdasarian’s character is constantly throwing loud parties when he isn’t working on a sort of jazz symphony. “Miss Lonelyhearts” finally gets a man (Harry Landers) to come to her apartment, only she throws him out again and slaps his face when he comes on to her too strongly and blatantly sexually instead of going through the romantic rituals she was expecting. After her disastrous would-be date she gets out pills and is about to commit suicide – Thelma Ritter’s character eavesdrops on her through Jefferies’s long-lensed camera (as so often in movies, the telephoto lens becomes a phallic symbol and in this instance reflects Jefferies’s obvious sexual frustration because he can’t make love to Lisa because of his cast) and immediately recognizes the pills and what Miss Lonelyhearts intends to do with them – when she hears Bagdasarian’s music, and its romantic feelings reawaken her desire to live.

But the interruption screws up Jefferies’s plans to entrap Thorwald and get him to confess to the murder of his wife because Stella tells Jefferies to call the police to have them rescue Miss Lonelyhearts, which ties up his phone long enough for Thorwald to come to Jefferies’s apartment and pitch him out the window. So Jefferies ends up (with typical Hitchcockian irony) with both legs broken and sentenced to seven weeks’ more isolation in that damned apartment. There’s also an intensely moving scene in which the woman member of the couple who slept out on the fire escape and got caught in the rain regularly lowers a basket to the ground containing her dog (apparently 1954 was the days before leash laws), only she finds the dog dead – Thorwald killed it to keep it from digging up the flowerbed where he’d buried the tools with which he cut up his wife’s body – and she cries out in anguish in a well-turned speech saying neighbors ought to be nice to each other and accusing one of them of killing her dog just because the pooch was nice to them. That turns out to be the clue Jefferies and Lisa seize on to deduce Thorwald killed both the dog and his wife because he’s the one person in the building who didn’t react to her outburst. Rear Window is a film that works on every conceivable level, including the well-chosen music. Though Bernard Herrmann, a frequent collaborator of both Hitchcock and Orson Welles, said Welles was the only musically literate director he ever worked with, that’s belied by the excellent smorgasbord of music Hitchcock and his composer on this film, Franz Waxman, added to Rear Window. Many pop songs from previous Paramount films, including “Mona Lisa,” “That’s Amore,” and Richard Rodgers’s “Lover,” appear; so do a few classical selections (including the aria “Ach, so fromm” a.k.a. “M’appari” from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha) and so extended an excerpt from Leonard Bernstein’s ballet Fancy Free (used as the music Miss Torso is practicing her dancing to) that Bernstein practically deserved a co-credit with Waxman as the film’s composer. Rear Window was remade as a TV-movie in 1998 with real-life disabled man Christopher Reeve in Stewart’s role and a Black man replacing Thelma Ritter as his nurse, but though that wasn’t a bad movie it’s hardly on the level of Hitchcock’s classic.