From my book...



READ WINDOW (1954)





Screenplay by John Michael Hayes based on a story by Cornell Woolrich.





One of my favorite movies of all time - I watch it at least once a year on DVD, and have seen it several times on the big screen. You may not know this, but a handful of classic Hitchcock films from this time period, including REAR WINDOW and ROPE, had been pulled from release for decades due to some strange rights issue. For a while it was thought that these films might never be seen again. They did not show on TV or in revival cinemas and were not available on VHS. Then, a bunch of lawyers got into some sort of steel cage match or something, and the good guys won, and the movies were once again available... and they even seriously restored them (which requires they track down prints and negatives from all over the world and find the best versions and then take *those* and work on them until they are like new). One of the interesting things about film restoration is that the most popular films are usually in the worst shape. That’s because the studios used to dupe prints off the original negative, and the more prints they duped the more wear and tear on the negative. Because they wouldn’t have to keep striking prints for an unsuccessful film, the negative wouldn’t go through all of that wear and tear and be in great shape. But a hit like REAR WINDOW? They needed lots of prints for lots of theaters and the film was so popular they’d re-release it again and again... and the original negative would be a mess. They would literally glue the negative together and laquer it to squeeze more prints out of it... knowing that eventually the negative would be garbage and that would be the end of the film.





Forever.





So being able to see REAR WINDOW is a double miracle, and when the (I think) five “lost” Hitchcock films had been restored, they gave them a theatrical run before going to VHS. The first time I saw REAR WINDOW I was already a huge Hitchcock fan and had the poster (for a movie I had never seen) on my wall. The film was legendary...








And also kind of the “perfect storm” movie for Bill Martell. Because the short story the movie is based on was written by one of my favorite writers, Cornell Woolrich. Woolrich is credited as one of the three “founders” of noir fiction (along with Horace McCoy and James M. Cain - two of my other favorite writers). “Noir” comes from a series of novels Woolrich wrote with the word “Black” in the titles, BRIDE WORE BLACK, BLACK ALIBI, BACK PATH OF FEAR, etc. that had all of the hallmarks of what we now call Noir. Darkness, despair, and other words beginning with D... about normal people who wrestled with the darkness inside them as they crossed the line into criminal activities... on purpose... and stayed on the wrong side of that line.





In a typical thriller the protagonist might do something slightly wrong and spend the rest of the movie paying for it. In Noir fiction the protagonist did something illegal knowingly... and continued to do the wrong thing. The lead characters in stories by Woolrich and Cain (DOUBLE INDEMNITY) were the bad guys if the story were told from the authority’s POV. They were not gangsters or professional criminals, they were regular people who did the wrong thing. In DOUBLE INDEMNITY Walter Neff commits a perfect murder so that he can collect a man’s life insurance and collect his widow. In Woolrich’s BRIDE WORE BLACK Jill Killeen tracks down the people who were involved in the hit and run death of her husband and murders them one by one... until she realizes that the man who may be her only chance at a new relationship was one of them... will she kill him or kiss him? It’s Noir, so kill is the answer.





When Woolrich’s BLACK series were published in France, they became the Serie Noir (Black Series) and part of the general fiction classification of Roman Noir (black fiction - meaning dark fiction). When these Noir novels became films, those French dudes called them Film Noir, and it stuck. Roman Noir had a kind of resurgence in the 80s thanks to Black Lizard Press reissuing many of the novels from the 30s as well as the 50s roman noirs of Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford and others. These days, Hard Case Crime publishes some Hardboiled Detective fiction, some Crime Fiction, and some Roman Noir fiction. Eventually I will find a recording booth and put my Film Noir class on audio CD, and I’ll get into all of this stuff in more detail.





Hitchcock only made one film based on a Woolrich story, which is surprising, but directed several short stories for his TV show and one for a *rival* TV show (4 O’CLOCK - a real nail-biter of a story about a husband who plots his wife’s murder... then gets caught in his own trap and realizes *he* will die at 4 O’clock along with her!). Woolrich wrote all kinds of things for the pulp mags, from Noirs to Thrillers to Hardboiled to Crime Fiction to Police Procedurals to Supernatural stories to “Whiz Bangs” (sort of screwball crime fiction). REAR WINDOW, based on a story called IT HAD TO BE MURDER, was a straight thriller about a man confined to his apartment who thinks he may have seen a neighbor murder his wife. It’s a short story, and it’s all “did he or didn’t he?” Three characters - the protagonist, the killer, and the protag’s male servant. This was beautifully expanded by John Michael Hayes into a great nail biter of a suspense film which explores male and female relationships better than any rom-com or romantic drama you can name.





Nutshell: Magazine News Photographer L.B. Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) is confined to his apartment with a broken leg, and spends his time watching his neighbors across the courtyard. He is engaged to a beautiful fashion model Lisa Freemont (Grace Kelly) whom he met on a shoot... but he is having all sorts of problems committing. He’s an adventurer who is used to living out of a backpack and sleeping on the ground when he’s on a story, she’s a fashion model who is used to a ton of luggage and first class hotels. In a way, this is the basic conflict in most male/female relationships, she wants nice things and he doesn’t care. Jeff has a nurse/physical therapist (the always great Thelma Ritter) and a cop best friend from back when he was covering the crime beat (Wendell Corey).





But it’s the people across the courtyard who are the focus of the film - as Jeff watches them, he learns all of the secrets of their lives... and one of those secrets may be murder. The traveling salesman Thorwald (Raymond Burr) may have murdered his nagging invalid wife. She seems to have vanished, and Thorwald is cleaning saws and big knives and has packed *something* in some cases that he sneaks out with in the middle of the night. Did he kill her and chop her up? Or is there some innocent explanation?





Hitch Appearance: Across the courtyard in the Composer’s apartment winding a clock.





The Experiment: I mentioned that Hitchcock usually does some interesting experiment in his films, from changing protagonists in PSYCHO to the continuous shot of ROPE (coming up) he doesn’t just make an emotionally involving thriller that is amazingly visual and uses the perfect combination of shots... he always seems to challenge himself by doing something that no one has ever done before on screen. You may never notice these experiments, because when they work they are completely invisible. In REAR WINDOW we get an interesting experiment in point of view - there isn’t a single shot where the camera is not in Jeff’s flat (until the very end). When we get a shot of some apartment across the courtyard, it is taken from inside Jeff’s flat. When we get a shot of inside Jeff’s flat, is taken from inside Jeff’s flat. When we get a shot of the street, it is taken from Jeff’s flat. Everything is seen through that rear window - everything. And, with the exception of one shot, we only see what Jeff sees. If he isn’t looking out the window, we don’t see it.





This puts us in Jeff’s shoes, and we see the story through his eyes. Not quite the total POV method of LADY IN THE LAKE (where we only see the protagonist when he looks in a mirror, and when he gets kissed or punched either the fist or the lips are coming right at us) or the opening of the noir flick DARK PASSAGE (based on a Goodis novel) where we escape from prison in pure POV shots. But - with the one exception - we see what he sees and nothing more... which makes it easy to identify with Jeff and easy to feel what he feels and suspect that Thorwald killed his wife.





In order to have the control over lighting and angle required to only show things through the rear window of Jeff’s apartment, they had to *build a city block of New York* in a studio at Paramount... including a street where real cars could drive back and forth. When you see the cars and the street and the buildings beyond - that’s a set built *indoors* on a sound stage!





One of the things I think is amusing - because we are always looking out Jeff’s apartment window, the facade of his building didn’t need to exist... except for a couple of shots at the end where he’s dangling out a window. So they had to build the exterior wall of Jeff’s apartment *just for those two or three shots*!





The idea of *only* seeing what Jeff can see creates identification with the character... and I can’t think of any movie made before or since that does this.

HITCHCOCK: EXPERIMENTS IN TERROR