© 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.