Private Lives: Rear Window (1954)
The classic Hitchcock film is only loosely based on the Cornell Woolrich story
Auteur theory states that certain filmmakers who exercise complete control of their films are essentially the “authors” of their film. There is no better example of this than Alfred Hitchcock. His movies were frequently adapted from suspense and mystery novels, but rarely faithfully. Instead, once inspired, he usually developed a story that reflected his sensibilities and style rather than the original source. A particularly good example of this is Rear Window, based on the Cornell Woolrich short story “It Had To Be Murder.”
The Story
With a cast on his leg, Hal Jeffries is stuck at home and passes time by staring at the rear windows of the building across the way. He’s done it so long that he can predict the patterns and habits of his neighbors, none of whom he actually knows. He becomes drawn to a mystery on the fourth floor apartment when the habits of Thorwald and his chronically ill wife suddenly change. The shades are now drawn; the wife has disappeared, and the husband seems nervous and agitated. Hal continues to watch until he starts suspecting that the husband has killed his wife. Now he just has to prove it.
The Adaptation
Cornell Woolrich was a prominent noir writer, but he rarely achieved the acclaimed that his peers (most notably Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler) did. “It Had To Be Murder” reveals very little about its characters; we might be watching Hal Jeffries through a rear window ourselves, knowing nothing about him but what we see him do. Hal onlyinteracts with two people in the story — his houseman Sam, who takes care of him and his apartment, and Boyne, the detective friend he alerts to the murder. The entire story takes place at the bay window in Hal’s apartment; the world is small, and the focus is entirely on the killer’s window. The police rather magically arrive just in time to save Hal and capture the murderer, and the ensuing chase seems drawn out longer than it needs to be. The real satisfaction for the reader is the solution to what happened to Mrs. Thorwald is clever, one that relies on Hal’s repeated viewings of the windows of the building behind him.
In Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Hal becomes Jeff (James Stewart), a globe trotting photographer laid up with a leg cast. Bored, he watches his neighbors in the rear window of his apartment, including the Thorwalds, an unhappily married couple. His girlfriend, fashion designer and socialite Lisa Fremont, visits in the hope of getting Jeff to commit, and his caregiver Stella warns him about becoming a peeping tom. One night a scream rings out, and the next day, Jeff realizes that Mrs. Thorwald seems to have disappeared. Eventually, he is able to convince Lisa and Stella of his suspicions, but Thorwald soon realizes he’s being watched — and by whom.
Rear Window features a richly colored world, full of ordinary people going about their lives, unaware of that they’re living next door to a murderer. Hitchcock’s movies often depicted a pleasant, placid world where evil is lurking just underneath. The evil is usually subdued or eliminated, and order is restored — but the placidity is an illusion. Chaos is always bubbling under the normal world of normal people and Hitchcock reveled in unleashing it on his unsuspecting characters.
Hitchcock had been forced by the studio to faithfully adapt Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca and always therefore always felt that it wasn’t a “true” Hitchcock movie. He almost always found inspiration from literature, but only as a starting point; his focus was usually on the undercurrents of human nature and how they can affect civilized society.
The title of the movie indicates what Hitchcock took from Woolrich’s story. Voyeurism is a prominent theme in many of Hitchcock’s movies; the camera often stands in for the viewer, surreptitiously spying on the characters. In Rear Window, the voyeur is main characters, and the voyeurism — both his and the audience’s — is literally the plot. The film diverges from Woolrich’s story in many ways, particularly in terms of the characters. Jeff, played by James Stewart, is a globetrotting photographer with close relationships with his girlfriend, his caregiver and his police detective friend Doyle, so he’s far less isolated than Woolrich’s narrator. Additionally, Hitchcock mini-subplots of Jeff’s neighbors which often aid or interfere with the larger mystery (such as the murder of a neighbor’s dog, or the attempted suicide of a lonely woman). These subplots emphasize Hitchcock’s critique of a voyeuristic society always searching for entertainment without considering the humanity it could lose. Additionally, Jeff’s skills as a photographer allow him to fend off Thorwald by blinding him with a flash bulb; it’s yet another way that the characters cannot rely on what they see. Thorwald’s fate in the movie also differs from the book.
A particularly notable change (and one that is rarely discussed) is how Thorwald disposes of his wife’s body. In the novel, the body is buried in the wet concrete going on in the apartment above. Hitchcock, however, chose a more gruesome and far more impractical method: Thorwald cuts his wife’s body up and ships the trunk. The logistics of this are ridiculous (for some reason Thorwald buries a lone hand in the garden), but in many ways typical of Hitchcock, who enjoyed gore, even he could not show much of it in early films. Woolrich is often criticized as having implausible plots, but the disposal of Mrs. Thorwald’s body makes sense, and is a desperate act of a man who killed rashly. Hitchcock’s version is not just implausible, but bordering on ridiculous; not once does Jeff see a drop of blood that could lead him to the conclusion that Thorwald chopped up his wife. Yet it is typical of a Hitchcock film; the brutal violence is offscreen, but we cringe with Jeff imagining it.
There’s always a debate over whether a viewed film could be as good as a written story. Hitchcock, however, sidestepped the whole issue by just borrowing ideas to craft his own vision that had very little to do with formal adaptation. Even though it has the most skeletal connection to the story that inspired it, the film still has the same themes of isolation and voyeurism — just filtered through Hitchcock’s perspective. Ultimately, Rear Window is a classic film from a thematic and technical standpoint, so it can be forgiven — as many of Hitchcock’s movies are — for its lack of fidelity to its source.
