Rear Window

Rear Window is a 1954 American mystery thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and written by John Michael Hayes, based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder". Originally released by Paramount Pictures, the film stars James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter, and Raymond Burr. It was screened at the 1954 Venice Film Festival in competition for the Golden Lion.

Rear Window is shot almost entirely from within one room and from the point-of-view outside the window. The film was made with a budget of $1 million ($11.7 million in 2024), and grossed $27 million during its initial release ($316 million in 2024).

Rear Window is considered by many filmgoers, critics, and scholars to be one of Hitchcock's best films, as well as one of the greatest films ever made. It received four Academy Award nominations, and was ranked number 42 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list and number 48 on the 10th-anniversary edition, and in 1997 was added to the United States National Film Registry in the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Professional photojournalist L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies, recuperating from adventurous assignment-related injuries, in a cast from his waist to his foot, is confined to a wheelchair in his Greenwich Village apartment. His mid-floor rear window looks out onto a courtyard with small garden plots, surrounded on four sides by apartments in adjoining buildings. Jeff is regularly visited by Stella, a middle-aged nurse, and his couture-dressed girlfriend, Lisa Fremont, a socialite who works in fashion.

During a heat wave, Jeff watches his neighbors through open windows, including a professional dancer coined "Miss Torso"; a songwriter with writer's block; a spinster who pantomimes dates with pretend suitors, "Miss Lonely-Hearts"; and traveling costume jewelry salesman Lars Thorwald, who is hen-pecked by his bedridden wife. One night, Jeff hears a woman scream followed by the sound of breaking glass. Later that night, Jeff wakes as a thunderstorm breaks; he observes Thorwald making repeated excursions carrying his Halliburton aluminum sample case. After Jeff has fallen asleep, Thorwald leaves his apartment along with a woman obscured by a large black hat.

The next morning, Jeff notices the Thorwald's shades are drawn, Thorwald's wife seems to be gone, and Jeff sees him cleaning a large knife and handsaw. Movers haul away a large trunk. After surveilling with binoculars and a camera with a telephoto lens, Jeff grows suspicious of Thorwald's activities. Convinced that Thorwald has murdered his wife, he first tells Stella, who becomes morbidly interested in the case, and then Lisa, who doubts him until they notice that Thorwald's wife is no longer in bed and the mattress is rolled up.

Jeff calls his friend, detective Tom Doyle, to request that he investigate Thorwald. While skeptical, Doyle thoroughly investigates, finds nothing suspicious, and posits that the Thorwalds were having marital problems, and Thorwald had sent his wife on a vacation upstate. Temporarily mollified by this explanation, Jeff and Lisa begin to question their "rear window ethics". Later that night, however, a neighbor’s dog is found dead in the courtyard; the previous day Thorwald had chased the dog away from digging his garden flowerbed. The dog's alarmed owner cries out, drawing the attention of everyone except Thorwald, who sits furtively in his dark apartment. Now convinced his theory is true, Jeff looks at slides taken two weeks earlier and notices that Thorwald has re-planted flowers in his garden, possibly to bury a body part.

The following night, Jeff telephones to lure Thorwald away from his apartment, enabling Lisa and Stella to investigate Thorwald's flowerbed. Finding nothing, Lisa decides to climb into Thorwald's open window to search his apartment. Stella hurries back to Jeff.

While Lisa is searching, Jeff and Stella are distracted when they see Miss Lonely-Hearts contemplating an overdose; they call the police. Coincidentally, the songwriter has finished his song "Lisa," playing it loudly; enthralled by the tune, Miss Lonely-Hearts abandons her suicide attempt. In the interim, Thorwald unexpectedly returns and catches Lisa, who attempts to talk her way out of trouble. Unconvinced, Thorwald attacks her, causing Lisa to cry out. The operator finally connects Jeff with the police, and he reports that a man is assaulting a woman at Thorwald's apartment. The police arrive to intervene as Lisa and Thorwald scuffle. During police questioning, Lisa signals to Jeff that she is wearing Mrs. Thorwald's wedding ring. Seeing this, Thorwald realizes Jeff is surveilling his apartment. Rather than expose Thorwald, Lisa allows herself to be arrested for breaking and entering so she can get to safety.

Jeff phones Doyle and leaves an urgent message while Stella leaves to bail Lisa out of jail. Locating Jeff’s apartment, Thorwald attacks him; Jeff’s only defense in a darkened apartment is snapping camera flash bulbs in Thorwald’s eyes. While they grapple, Doyle and other officers arrive, followed by Lisa and Stella. Police apprehend Thorwald just as he drops Jeff out of his window. Thorwald confesses his wife's murder to the police.

A few days later, the heat wave has broken, and life in the apartment complex has returned to normal. Miss Lonely-Hearts is seen socializing with the songwriter in his studio apartment while he plays music, Thorwald's neighbors get a new puppy, Miss Torso's homely-looking boyfriend Stanley returns from army deployment, and the newlyweds honeymoon period has ended. Having broken his other leg in the fall, Jeff is still wheelchair-bound, now with both legs in casts. Lisa is seen stretched out next to him, wearing more casual attire and reading a travel book. After noticing Jeff asleep, she puts aside the book on exploration titled Beyond the High Himalayas and turns instead to read Harper's Bazaar.

Uncredited

Cast notes

Rear Window is filmed almost entirely within Jeff's apartment and from his near-static point-of-view at his window. In Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," she identifies what she sees as voyeurism and scopophilia in Hitchcock's movies, with Rear Window used as one example of how she sees cinema as incorporating the patriarchy into the way that pleasure is constructed and signaled to the audience. Additionally, she sees the "male gaze" as especially evident in Rear Window in the portrayal of characters such as the dancer "Miss Torso", who is a spectacle for both Jeff and the audience (through his substitution) to enjoy.

In his 1954 review of the film, François Truffaut suggested "this parable: The courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses."

John Fawell notes in Dennis Perry's book Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror that Hitchcock "recognized that the darkest aspect of voyeurism ... is our desire for awful things to happen to people ... to make ourselves feel better, and to relieve ourselves of the burden of examining our own lives." Hitchcock challenges the audience, forcing them to peer through his rear window and become exposed to, as Donald Spoto calls it in his 1976 book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures, the "social contagion" of acting as voyeur.

In his book Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window", John Belton further addresses the underlying issues of voyeurism which he asserts are evident in the film. He says "Rear Window's story is 'about' spectacle; it explores the fascination with looking and the attraction of that which is being looked at."

In an explicit example of a condemnation of voyeurism, Stella expresses her outrage at Jeffries' voyeuristic habits, saying, "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."

With further analysis, Jeff's positive evolution understandably would be impossible without voyeurism—or as Robin Wood puts it in his 1989 book Hitchcock's Films Revisited, "the indulging of morbid curiosity and the consequences of that indulgence."

The screenplay, which was written by John Michael Hayes, was based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story It Had to Be Murder. However, in 1990 the question as to who owned the film rights of Woolrich's original story went before the Supreme Court of the United States in Stewart v. Abend. Although the film was copyrighted in 1954 by Patron Inc. by a production company set up by Hitchcock and Stewart, a subsequent rights holder refused to acknowledge previous rights agreements. As a result, Stewart and Hitchcock's estate became involved in the Supreme Court case. Its outcome led to the litigant, Sheldon Abend, becoming credited as a producer of the 1998 remake of Rear Window.

The film was shot entirely at stage 17 at Paramount Studios which included an enormous indoor set to replicate a Greenwich Village courtyard, with the set stretching from the bottom of the basement storeroom to the top of the lighting grid in the ceiling. The lighting was rigged with four interchangeable scene lighting arrangements: morning, afternoon, evening, and night-time. Set designers Hal Pereira and Joseph MacMillan Johnson spent six weeks building the extremely detailed and complex set, which ended up being the largest of its kind at Paramount. One of the unique features of the set was its massive drainage system, constructed to accommodate the rain sequence in the film. They also built the set around a highly nuanced lighting system which was able to create natural-looking lighting effects for both the day and night scenes. Though the address given in the film is 125 W. Ninth Street in New York's Greenwich Village, the set was actually based on a real courtyard located at 125 Christopher Street.