Rear Window

Director: Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Hitchcock

Overview

Laid up with a broken leg, photojournalist L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) is confined to his tiny, sweltering courtyard apartment. To pass the time between visits from his nurse (Thelma Ritter) and his fashion model girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly), the binocular-wielding Jeffries stares through the rear window of his apartment at the goings-on in the other apartments around his courtyard. As he watches his neighbors, he assigns them such roles and character names as "Miss Torso" (Georgine Darcy), a professional dancer with a healthy social life or "Miss Lonelyhearts" (Judith Evelyn), a middle-aged woman who entertains nonexistent gentlemen callers. Of particular interest is seemingly mild-mannered travelling salesman Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), who is saddled with a nagging, invalid wife. One afternoon, Thorwald pulls down his window shade, and his wife's incessant bray comes to a sudden halt. Out of boredom, Jeffries casually concocts a scenario in which Thorwald has murdered his wife and disposed of the body in gruesome fashion. Trouble is, Jeffries' musings just might happen to be the truth. One of Alfred Hitchcock's very best efforts, Rear Window is a crackling suspense film that also ranks with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) as one of the movies' most trenchant dissections of voyeurism. As in most Hitchcock films, the protagonist is a seemingly ordinary man who gets himself in trouble for his secret desires.

Product Details

Release Date:	09/04/2012
UPC:	0025192154638
Original Release:	1954
Rating:	PG
Source:	UNIVERSAL STUDIOS
Region Code:	1
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Stereo]
Language:	English
Time:	1:55:00
Sales rank:	2,779

Special Features

Rear Window Ethics: An Original Documentary; A Conversation with Screenwriter John Michael Hayes; Production Photographs

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

James Stewart	L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies
Grace Kelly	Lisa Carol Fremont
Thelma Ritter	Stella
Wendell Corey	Lieutenant Thomas J. Doyle
Raymond Burr	Mr. Lars Thorwald
Judith Evelyn	Miss Lonelyheart
Ross Bagdasarian	The Composer
Georgine Darcy	Miss Torso
Irene Winston	Mrs. Thorwald
Sara Berner	Woman on Fire Escape
Ralph Smiley	Carl the Waiter
Alan Lee	Landlord
Frank Cady	Fire Escape Man
Jesslyn Fax	Miss Hearing Aid
Rand Harper	Honeymooner
Havis Davenport	Newlywed
Marla English	Party Girl
Kathryn Grant	Party Girl
Anthony Warde	Detective
Bennie Bartlett	Miss Torso's Friend
Barbara Bailey	Choreographer
Bess Flowers	Woman with Poodle
Fred Graham	Stunt Detective (uncredited)
Iphigenie Castiglioni	Bird Woman
Harry Landers	Young Man
Richard Simmons	Man,Actor
Alfred Hitchcock	Butler in Songwriter's Apartment
Eddie Parker	Actor
Jerry Antes	Dancer
Mike Mahoney	Policeman
Len Hendry	Policeman
James Cornell	Man
Franz Waxman	Composer

Technical Credits

John Michael Hayes

Alfred Hitchcock	Director,Producer
John Michael Hayes	Screenwriter
John P. Fulton	Special Effects
Loren L. Ryder	Sound Mixer

Editorial Reviews

On the surface a comic thriller about a photographer and the crime he thinks took place across the courtyard, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) turns into an interrogation of voyeurism and movie-viewing. Keeping the camera in Jeff's apartment (except for a couple of shots near the climax), Hitchcock limits the audience's view to what Jeff can see and hear from his immobilized perch. He is free to take in the spectacle of the events in the apartments that he sees, but he is powerless to intervene. Why he looks, however, is the larger question; Hitchcock suggests not just that Jeff is channel-surfing among apartments for idle entertainment but also that the urge to peep is a more universal trait than we might care to acknowledge. What Jeff finds, moreover, becomes a fantasy projection of his own fears about his own relationship with Lisa. Jeff becomes a voyeur to escape, but his gaze is literally -- and violently -- turned back on him by the suspected wife-killer in his thriller narrative. Wryly entertaining as well as skillfully executed and thematically complex, the popular Rear Window earned Hitchcock an Oscar nomination for Best Director and inspired such later films as Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma's Sisters (1973). It was remade in 1998 as a TV movie with Christopher Reeve in the James Stewart role.