Rear Window (1954)

What the trade papers reported

The Canadian Moving Picture Digest of 4 Sep 1954, in a survey marking Paramount’s 40th anniversary, listed Rear Window among the company’s pictures already in release. It described a Technicolor suspense thriller starring Stewart and Kelly, with Corey and Ritter in support. The same survey placed The Country Girl among finished films awaiting release and To Catch a Thief, with Cary Grant and Kelly, among those still in production or editing. A Paramount advertisement in that issue said September bookings were arriving and spoke of a “smash performance” in New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. The advertisement carried the credit “Color by Technicolor.”

The Digest’s city listings then follow the film across Canada. The 2 Oct 1954 issue has it in a second week at the Met in Winnipeg and the Orpheum in Vancouver, and playing the Paramount in St. John. The 6 Nov 1954 issue has it in a second week at Loew’s in Montreal. These listings name Stewart alone, although the paper’s news items bill him with Kelly.

The 6 Nov issue carried a promotion from Len Bishop at Shea’s Theatre in Toronto: anyone with a leg in a cast could attend as his guest at any performance in the opening week. The notice described Stewart’s part as a press photographer with a broken leg and called the murder story “hair-raising.” The same issue gave the Guild’s list as announced by its president, George Sidney: A Star Is Born, The Caine Mutiny, On the Waterfront, Rear Window, Sabrina and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Dial M for Murder had been chosen earlier in the year, so Hitchcock had two pictures in the group. That group, with nominations from the last quarter’s releases, was to supply the Guild’s choice for its annual directing award in January.

The reviews

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the film a “tense and exciting exercise” but held that what it said about people and human nature was “superficial and glib.” He allowed that it exposed the loneliness of city life and that its purpose was sensation. Variety called it “one of Alfred Hitchcock’s better thrillers” and remarked on an “earthy quality” in the relationship between Stewart and Kelly. Time rated it “just possibly the second-most entertaining picture” Hitchcock had made, behind The 39 Steps, while noting “studied lapses of taste.” Harrison’s Reports called it a “first-rate thriller” and “strictly an adult entertainment,” and credited its comedy and romance with relieving the tension.

François Truffaut, in a 1954 review, offered a parable that made the courtyard the world, the photographer the filmmaker and the binoculars the camera. Cahiers du Cinéma placed the film fifth on its Top 10 list in 1955. The accounts of Stewart’s career say most of the first praise went to Hitchcock rather than to him.

Later accounts

Wikipedia’s article on Kelly dates the opening to October 1954. Its article on the film records a benefit world premiere on August 4, 1954, at the Rivoli Theatre in New York, with proceeds going to the American-Korean Foundation, and the 4 Sep Digest already has the picture running in three cities. The same article gives two money figures without reconciling them: a $27 million gross in the initial release on a $1 million budget, and $5.3 million in North American rentals.

Kelly recalled that Hitchcock kept discussing Rear Window with her throughout the making of Dial M for Murder, before there was any talk of casting her. She had turned down On the Waterfront, and she shot the film in a consecutive run with The Country Girl and Green Fire. The New York Film Critics Circle gave her its Best Actress award for Rear Window, Dial M for Murder and The Country Girl together. Donald Spoto, whose 1976 book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock has a foreword by Kelly, wrote there of the “social contagion” of acting as voyeur. He later published a biography of her, High Society.

For Stewart, the later writing centers on the darker turn. His photographer was loosely based on Robert Capa, and he had to react largely with his face because the character is held to a wheelchair. Vincent Canby called the performance “grand.” Roger Ebert grouped Jefferies with the darker parts directors gave Stewart after the war, and John Belton placed the role among his “disturbed voyeur” characters for Hitchcock. Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” used the film as an example of the male gaze, citing the dancer Miss Torso.

The set and the sound

The production accounts describe an indoor set on stage 18 at Paramount, replicating a Greenwich Village courtyard, that Hal Pereira and Joseph MacMillan Johnson took six weeks to build. It held 31 apartments wired for electricity and supplied with running water, about 12 of them furnished, and a drainage system made for the rain sequence. It was modeled on an actual courtyard at 125 Christopher Street, although the film gives the address as 125 W. Ninth Street. The 90-second opening scene needed many rehearsals and ten takes across half a day. Franz Waxman’s credited score was limited to the opening and closing titles and the songwriter’s tune “Lisa,” and Hitchcock otherwise relied mainly on music and noise from within the story, including Bing Crosby’s voice drifting across the courtyard.

The rights and the return

The copyright was taken in 1954 by Patron Inc., a company set up by Hitchcock and Stewart. Rear Window was one of five Paramount-era films whose rights reverted to Hitchcock after eight years, and he kept them out of circulation for almost 20 years. Universal bought them in 1983 for a rumored $6 million. Ebert, reviewing that October’s re-release, compared watching it to spying on one’s neighbors and called viewers “accomplices” in the voyeurism, while Canby wrote in 1983 that its appeal “remains undiminished.” The rights to Woolrich’s story reached the Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend in 1990, and the litigant, Sheldon Abend, was credited as a producer of the 1998 television remake with Christopher Reeve. The Library of Congress chose the film for the National Film Registry in 1997, and Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz restored it for a limited 1999 run in Technicolor dye-transfer prints, the first the title had been given.