By Peter Tonguette
In what may have represented a television first (and last) in June of 1972, Alfred Hitchcock appeared on “The Dick Cavett Show” to expound on the principles of montage. To be sure, Hitchcock’s conversation with the witty, well-informed Cavett included the usual humorous anecdotes, but at one point, the Master of Suspense gave the viewers at home a lesson in editing theory. By way of example, Hitchcock turned to one of his signature films, “Rear Window,” starring James Stewart as L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies, a photojournalist whose temporarily wheelchair-bound status leads him to idly ponder the lives being led outside his Greenwich Village apartment window, including that of a potential murderer residing across the courtyard.
“You have James Stewart, a close-up of him, and he looks, you see, and you cut,” Hitchcock told Cavett. To make his point, he then proposed several possibilities as to what Stewart might see in the first shot after that close-up. “Say, for example, a woman nursing a baby,” Hitchcock said. “Now you go back to Mr. Stewart and he smiles. So what have we demonstrated? That he’s a nice, benevolent gentleman.” Hitchcock went on: “Now take the middle piece of film away — he looks, he sees, now cut to a girl in a bikini, and he smiles. Now he’s a dirty old man!”
Hitchcock delivered his lesson in a lighthearted, audience-friendly manner, but on the whole, he was entirely serious: motion picture editing has sufficient power that we perceive the two unchanging close-ups of Stewart differently, depending on the hypothetical image sandwiched between them. Hitchcock applied his intuitive grasp of montage to all his films, but it is no accident that he chose “Rear Window” to illustrate his point. The film, released by Paramount Pictures in 1954, rigorously adheres to the structure Hitchcock outlined to Cavett and had earlier articulated, more succinctly and a bit more dryly, in conversation with Francois Truffaut: “You have an immobilized man looking out. That’s one part of the film. The second part shows how he reacts. This is the purest expression of a cinematic idea.” These are the notes by which Hitchcock made cinematic music.
Happily, “Rear Window” is the subject of a peppily written, scrupulously researched new book by author Jennifer O’Callaghan. Although a whole catalogue of books exists on Hitchcock, O’Callaghan recognizes the centrality of “Rear Window.” Hitchcock had made great films before — certainly “The 39 Steps” (1935), “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943), and “Strangers on a Train” (1951) must be counted among his masterpieces — but none with the combination of personal revelation and aesthetic perfection found in “Rear Window.” “For the first time, a commercially successful film would force its audience to examine their inner life and the way they regarded others,” O’Callaghan writes. “ ‘Rear Window’ held a mirror to society without preaching. It simply presented the universal facts of human behavior.”
As O’Callaghan demonstrates, “Rear Window” represented a risk for its creative team (and its studio) from the get-go. Among other challenges was the perception that the single-set location — Jefferies’ Greenwich Village apartment, from which he makes his observations of his neighbors — was somehow restrictive. “With the limited setting, mostly filmed in a shabby, dark room of the protagonist’s apartment, studio executives weren’t sure what to make of it,” she writes. “It was also possible during such a conservative time in history that audiences could morally object to its voyeuristic nature.” And some did — but that was after the cameras had finished rolling and the final splice had been made.
To start with, O’Callaghan freely admits that the treatment for what became “Rear Window,” which was submitted to Hitchcock by Broadway director-producer Joshua Logan, was for what she calls an “experimental mainstream film.” It was based on the short story “It Had to Be Murder” by Cornell Woolrich, whose sensibility was well-suited for Hitchcock. “Some readers couldn’t get past the inconsistencies of his storytelling, which sometimes took bizarre tangents, but Hitchcock was entranced by ‘It Had to Be Murder,’” O’Callaghan writes. “Making the antihero a typical Peeping Tom confined to his apartment by an injury … struck the director as pure genius.” To adapt the tale, Hitchcock’s agent, Lew Wasserman, pulled another name from his client list, an on-the-rise screenwriter named John Michael Hayes. A radio veteran, his most salable attributes, according to O’Callaghan, were his youth, eagerness, and low price tag. However, the two men turned out to be simpatico; Hayes said he “accidentally” brought Hitchcock a fresh viewpoint on aspects of suspense.
Although Hitchcock had previously mined Cary Grant’s persona for its combination of deviltry and charm in films like “Suspicion” (1941) and “Notorious” (1946), the director needed an actor with a different, more workaday set of skills to inhabit Jefferies. “[Grant] was too charming, too dapper — the type of man Hitchcock fantasized himself becoming,” writes O’Callaghan, who notes that the director saw that Stewart’s “likable common man appeal” concealed “repression of dark desire, something Hitchcock wrestled with himself.” For Stewart, adrift with a sagging postwar screen career, this was a welcome opportunity. “I guess I’d only be suitable for playing grandfather to Mickey Rooney,” the actor had told The New York Times in 1947. Hitchcock had something more substantial on offer: a part, O’Callaghan notes, that demanded him “to dig deep to portray the complexities and contradictions of being a flawed human.” For Jefferies’ girlfriend (and occasional co-conspirator in snooping), Lisa Fremont, Hitchcock seized upon Grace Kelly, the leading lady of the film he was working on amid preparations for “Rear Window,” 1954’s shot-in-3D English mystery “Dial M for Murder.” “Until I met Grace, I just wanted to get through this thing [‘Dial M’] as quickly and unceremoniously as I could,” the director said. “Then I realized, here was a girl I could really do something with.”
O’Callaghan does not merely recount details of pre-production and shooting, but offers her incisive take on what decisions were made and why. For example, she contrasts the heavies in other Hitchcock films with Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), the neighbor who falls under Jefferies’ accusatory gaze in “Rear Window.” “Previous villains in Hitchcock films were often tall and attractive. . . . But Lars Thorwald circles a completely different orbit,” she writes. “He’s a down-on-his-luck, depressed shmuck who sells jewelry for a living.” Viewers who had not before noticed Burr’s resemblance to a certain then-famous studio head will not, after reading O’Callaghan’s account, be able to get the image out of their mind: “[Burr] bore such a strikingly uncanny resemblance to producer David O. Selznick, it was eerie.”
Details abound, too, on Paramount Pictures’ Stage 18, on and beneath which sat the Greenwich Village set. “For the courtyard, laborers had to dig thirty feet below the stage level, so far that they struck water,” writes O’Callaghan, who also notes that since Hitchcock and company had set up shop in the corner of the set that housed Jefferies’s apartment, means had to be devised for the director to communicate to actors in adjacent apartments. Assistant director Herbert Coleman and Paramount sound department head George Dutton arrived at a solution: “The sound crew had little receivers they normally used for dance sequences when they hid them in actors’ ears so they could hear the tempo of the music while performing. Hitchcock would use these same devices to instruct his actors, and the most fun part — when he gave directions, they wouldn’t be able to say anything back.” Meanwhile, a tour of this astonishing set given to industry enforcers of the Motion Picture Production Code — on edge about the movie’s voyeuristic elements — had the intended effect: it wowed them. “We readily agreed that the camera location and nature of this rather extraordinary set eliminated much of the concern felt in reading the script material,” said Paramount liaison to the Motion Picture Association of America, Luigi Luraschi.
O’Callaghan digs up a quote from Stewart in which he mused about Hitchcock’s method of intercutting close-ups of the actor with various happenings across the courtyard. “I spent an astonishing amount of time looking into the camera and being amused, afraid, worried, embarrassed, bored, the works,” Stewart said in an interview with Roger Ebert. What might have seemed inscrutable to Stewart, however, was crystal clear to Hitchcock, who was working for the first time with the man who would become his longtime picture editor, George Tomasini, ACE. According to O’Callaghan, Hitchcock prescribed exact cuts to Tomasini — “Okay, cut three frames there. Add seven there” — but she acknowledges that “Rear Window” was “a tricky beast to edit” without “room for even a millisecond of error.” “After an eternity of meticulous starting and stopping, the film got to a point where it could be viewed all the way through,” she writes. Although Hitchcock maintained “his typical blank expression” upon its conclusion, he told the editor, “I think we have a movie.” Typical understatement from the Master of Suspense, who, of course, knew what he had: As O’Callaghan writes, “he wouldn’t dream of shooting one reel of film without creative storyboards in place for action sequences.” Those reading this book with an eye (or ear) toward post-production will also find helpful the account of the work of composer Franz Waxman and the overall sound design, in which “snippets of songs and street sounds drift through the Waxman soundtrack, in and out of courtyard windows.”
Preview audiences rounded up for an April 1954 screening at the Academy Theatre in Pasadena generated the usual mixed report. One commentator complained, “Too many suggestive comments,” while another nit-picked on story points: “Why did he kill his wife? What was in the hatbox?” Critics, though positive, were not as effusive as they might have been, with Time magazine pointing to “occasional studied lapses of taste.” Years later, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby summarized the prevailing contemporary critical read on the film: “There was a certain amount of self-righteous outrage directed at the film’s seemingly casual attitude toward voyeurism, sometimes called ‘Peeping Tomism.’” Yet general audiences assured that the movie made money ($5.3 million in revenue).
Needing enough material to sustain a book, O’Callaghan ventures beyond “Rear Window,” including into the subsequent lives and careers of its principals. All of this is well told, but in the context of the vast trove of previous books on Hitchcock, Stewart, and Kelly, it reads like a bite-sized condensation of their lives and times. The book is stronger as a deep dive into “Rear Window” than a superficial survey of Hitchcock and company — but, happily, O’Callaghan returns to the film as her focal point as her book wraps up. The 1998 remake starring Christopher Reeve is discussed, as are those films that operated under the influence of the Hitchcock classic, including many (many) works by Brian De Palma, who is quoted thus: “Hitchcock pioneered a whole type of film grammar. He taught us how to express things as clearly, visually, I think, as they can be expressed.”
Most interesting are various postscripts to “Rear Window” itself. After Hitchcock’s death, Universal Classics president James C. Katz endeavored to secure the rights to re-release Hitchcock’s so-called “forbidden five”—the quintet of films to which the filmmaker’s heirs had walked away with the rights and which were, consequently, not readily screenable for many years. “These films were the Hitchcocks’ bread and butter, and they wouldn’t be parting with them without a fight,” O’Callaghan writes. In time, Katz prevailed, and “Rear Window,” one of the five films to which Universal Classics had gained the right to rerelease, was the hit of the 1983 New York Film Festival, O’Callaghan reports. “The audience was really with it, and I thought that was just amazing,” Stewart said at the time to The New York Times. “It just bears out the feeling that so many of us had about Hitch and his way of doing things.”
Katz and film archivist Robert A. Harris later undertook an ambitious restoration of “Rear Window” that made its way to theaters in 2000, including at a cinema center in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, with the gentlemanly Katz in attendance to introduce the restoration and take questions. I was 16, and it was my first time seeing “Rear Window” on the big screen. I can attest to Katz’s general account of audience response to seeing the film in this marvelous restored version. “It was fascinating to see the reaction of people who had never seen it before,” he said. “Young students, including my kids at the time of the restoration, were born during the dead period of ‘Rear Window,’ so they were not exposed to it until then.”
With luck, this enthusiastic and engaging book will promote the greatness of “Rear Window” for future film students, enthusiasts of montage, and cinematic Peeping Toms.
