So now we come to the end of the movie, and visually, this is a scene about Grace Kelly. Jimmy Stewart has wondered, you know, “Is she the girl for me? She’s a Park Avenue girl. Is she tough enough for me?” She breaks into Raymond Burr’s apartment, you know, the bad guy’s apartment when he’s not there, to get a clue.

From here on it’s just that song, which is called “Lisa.” This is the fullest expression of the song we’ve heard in the movie so far, the most complete version of the song that represents their love story. But what’s happening is that Hitchcock is showing us the part of the movie that’s a murder mystery. This is really suspenseful and painful to watch. The soundtrack is climaxing the love story, cause the song is telling us that Jimmy Stewart is now finally in love with Grace Kelly. But the disconnect is rich. If you have the soundtrack telling you one part of the story, and the visuals telling you another, there’s this richness that comes out of it, as well as a tension because the mood of the music is not the mood of what we’re seeing.

Perhaps even more to the point, we’re seeing the two threads of the plot finally meshing. The song ends as the police arrive and Lisa passes out of danger. Now all that remains is for Lisa to reveal the wedding ring—and by doing so, expose Jeff, for the first time, to Thorwald’s baleful gaze.

Thomson is iconoclastic and opinionated, and can’t always be relied upon to endorse the received canon. But his write up of RW couldn’t be more favorable. It begins: “There are great films and great entertainments. Sometimes one film is both—take Rear Window.”

His final paragraph is also laudatory and concise:

It’s 112 minutes. It’s funny, tart, tender, thoughtful, desperate, and as neat and tidy a moral parable about looking at things and getting involved as you’re ever going to find. I suppose I’ve watched it forty times or so, and I’m still waiting for it to taste like less than a Meyer lemon fresh from the tree. But as time passes, the suspense falls away, and the bones of greater comedy emerge.

I don’t know whether Thomson is referring to small “c” comedy or comedy that begins with a capital letter, but either way he’s right. Hey, sometimes even iconoclasts find themselves traveling coach.

Now for the longer answer: both WtM and RW share a common antecedent. In The Window (1949), a boy can’t convince his parents—let alone the police—that he has witnessed a murder. Even earlier, Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), another Stanwyck picture, featured a woman in danger who has discovered a murder plot and whom no one believes. Another influence on WtM—if not RW—is probably Gaslight (1944), as part of Saunders’ strategy to avoid detection is to discredit Stanwyck by making her appear a mental case. He does his job so well he has even Stanwyck’s character questioning her sanity.

It’s interesting to compare and contrast WtM and RW. In WtM, Stanwyck’s character uses binoculars to study the murderer in his apartment across the way. Also, Saunders makes a late attempt on Stanwyck’s life. He visits her in her room and tries to throw her out her window, the very one through which she witnessed the initial crime. The film differs from RW in a number of ways, most notably in that there is never any doubt about the crime. Also, the film spends a lot of time with the murderer; long before we’re introduced to Stanwyck we see Saunders acting to avoid detection.

WtM is an entertaining film, with good performances, moments of suspense, and high-contrast B&W photography by John Alton (it was directed by Roy Rowland). But it doesn’t have Grace Kelly, the exploration of a mammoth single set, the witty dialog of John Michael Hayes, or Hitchcock’s deft direction. WtM is what you might expect Hollywood to produce after rolling out any number of woman-in-peril pictures. RW remains sui generis.

The recognized cameo is easily spotted and comes just as the opening titles finish: trying to board a bus, Hitchcock gets the door slammed in his face. The second cameo occurred–supposedly–later, on the train, when Cary Grant emerges after hiding in the restroom. Just visible down the corridor at that moment is a woman, sitting, whose profile bears a striking resemblance to the director’s. Hitchcock in a dress?

DavyP has the details here. But after examining the evidence, the conclusion he reaches is that it’s a cameo, all right, just not Hitchcock’s. It’s an actress named Jesslyn Fax, a veteran of many Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes. Here’s the RW connection: she’s the woman who plays Miss Hearing Aid, the sculptress, seen napping at the end of the picture. Those cameos can be exhausting, I guess.

Birds are frequent visitors to Hitchcock’s cinema, they perch in Sabotage and Foreign Correspondent, the sinister shadow of one hovers in a dream in Spellbound. If you care to stretch a point, there is even a giant, machine-gun-firing bird that menaces Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Famously, stuffed birds decorate Norman Bates’s inner office in Psycho. And of course, birds are the point of The Birds.

There are those—let us call them motif mongers—who see all these birds about and shout, Symbol, symbol! They attempt to ascribe to the motif a single, unvarying association. And because the birds of The Birds are the most flamboyant members of their kind, visiting mayhem on humanity, your typical motif monger would have us believe birds in Hitchcock are always portents of death or destruction.

But not so fast, birdseed breath! The matter is more complicated than that. Let’s remember that even in The Birds there is a benign avian pair out of sync with their rampaging brothers and sisters. These lovebirds are present at the beginning of the film, and actually bring the hero and heroine together. At the end of the film, the lovebirds are retained, even as the couple are fleeing all the other birds. Clearly, there are distinctions to be drawn among birds.

Let us return to RW. I can’t tell how many birds are in the cage at the beginning of the film, but at the end there are two—at least, I’d like to think there are. Nothing malign can attach to these creatures. In fact, given the tenor of the film’s ending, might not the birds reappear at that point simply to share in the harmony and bliss that is building about the courtyard? Hmmm, what kind of birds are they, anyway?Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

REAR WINDOW – SPECIAL EDITION

In this suspenseful story in which the Master of Suspense reveals both the fascination and the consequences of voyeurism, a professional photographer (James Stewart) suspects his neighbor of murdering his nagging wife based on conjecture while observing through his window across the courtyard. He enlists his socialite girlfriend (Grace Kelly) to help investigate the suspicious chain of events. Honored in one of AFI’s “100 Years … 100 Movies” for excellence in film, Rear Window has also been hailed as “one of Alfred
Hitchcock’s most stylish thrillers” (Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide). With indepth bonus features and a digitally remastered picture, this cinematic masterpiece succeeds in drawing the audience in as accomplice at first, then as prey to the proceedings as the hunter becomes the hunted.

BONUS FEATURES:

• *Audio Commentary: Feature-length audio commentary with John Fawell (author of Hitchcock’s Rear Window: The Well-Made Film)
• *Pure Cinema: Through the Eyes of the Master: A look at Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest sequences and the virtuoso filmmaking techniques behind them.
• *Breaking Barriers: The Sound of Hitchcock: An examination of Alfred
Hitchcock’s innovative use of sound throughout his films.
• * François Truffaut Interviews Alfred Hitchcock: Excerpts from a 1962 audio interview with Alfred Hitchcock.
• *Alfred Hitchcock Presents “Mr. Blanchard’s Secret”: A full-length episode from Season 2 of Alfred Hitchcock’s landmark TV series.
• Rear Window Ethics: An Original Documentary: An in-depth documentary on Alfred Hitchcock’s voyeuristic masterpiece.
• A Conversation with the Screenwriter John Michael Hayes: Rear Window’s
screenwriter reflects on the making of the film.
• Production Photographs: View publicity photos featuring the cast.
• Production Notes: Read an essay on the making of the film.
• Theatrical Trailer: Watch the original promotional trailer from the film’s theatrical campaign.
• Re-Release Trailer: Watch the promotional trailer created for the re-release of the film narrated by James Stewart.
*Bonus feature is new to this edition.

CAST AND FILMMAKERS

Directed By: Alfred Hitchcock
Written By: John Michael Hayes (Screenplay), Cornell Woolrich (Short Story)
Produced By: James C. Katz
Director of Photography: Robert Burks
Edited By: George Tomasini
Costume Designer: Edith Head
Original Music By: Franz Waxman
Cast: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Raymond Burr, Thelma Ritter

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

DVD
Street Date: October 7, 2008
Pre-Order Close: September 2, 2008
Copyright: 2008 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Price: $26.98
Selection Number: 61102353
Running Time: 1 Hour, 55 Minutes
Layers: Dual
Aspect Ratio: Anamorphic Widescreen (1.66:1)
Rating: PG
Technical Info: English and French Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English SDH; French and Spanish Subtitles

Unless you’ve seen the original, the piece is pretty impressive. Still, for a student project, intended to demonstrate the knowledge the makers have acquired, it’s reasonably effective. But what is it the students have learned? Yes, Jeff is the protagonist, but guys, guys, no way is Lisa the antagonist–that’s Thorwald (Lisa, if you wish, can be labeled the deuteragonist). And I can’t believe some of the things coming out of the mouths of these 20-year-old kids: Jeff feels he’s too “inadequate” to have Lisa as a girlfriend or wife; RW is the first film to present a voyeur as its hero; one of the concerns of RW is feminism. Where are they getting this stuff? Not from the film, that’s for sure.

A better reading is available. Lesley Brill, in his wonderful The Hitchcock Romance (1988), makes this observation about an image early in the movie:

After surveying the awakening block of apartments, the camera returns to Jeffries [sic] and pans over his broken leg, smashed camera, and the picture that resulted from his dangerous trackside photography. It then stops for a moment on a negative close-up, framed in a light box, of a female model. From there it moves to the positive image of the same photograph on the cover of a fashion magazine.

Other than the misspelling of Jefferies’ name and the fashion magazine flub—it’s actually, I think, an ersatz cover of Life, spring fashion issue—Brill’s description is accurate. And the point he is making is worth noting: “These images, the picture and its negative, are at once identical and opposite to each other.”

Brill has his own agenda—something about irony and romance—which I’m ignoring here because I think what he has in fact done is given us the key to understanding the images from Planet Thorwald beaming in from across the courtyard. First, however, we must dispose of an inconvenient counter-reading.

Early, a correspondence is established between the Thorwalds’ world and Jeff’s. On the phone with Gunnison, Jeff describes a hypothetical domestic situation he imagines for himself; meanwhile we see the very situation being acted out between the Thorwalds. At that point the correspondence between Jeff and Thorwald is pretty close to one-to-one. But this correspondence is only temporary, a means of illustration that is dropped once it has served its purpose. In an essay “The Space of Rear Window,” John Belton points to a later event to explain how we know this.

. . . it is surely no coincidence that the Thorwalds’ apartment is directly opposite Jeff’s and at a level that is approximately the same as his own. Indeed, its frequent presence in the background of scenes that take place in Jeff’s apartment subtly colors our reading of those scenes. Most significantly, it provides a crucial point of reference at the conclusion of Jeff’s first argument with Lisa, when he refuses to leave the magazine and become a fashion photographer. As Lisa begins to set the table for dinner, Jeff looks at the Thorwald apartment which is also engaged in dinner activity. The mirroring that takes place here is rather complex. Thorwald, who in several respects reflects Jeff’s notion of marriage as entrapment and whose plight is compounded by the fact that his wife is an invalid, serves her dinner in bed. She openly rejects this husbandly gesture by tossing aside the flower which he had put on her tray. Meanwhile, Lisa, whom Jeff has just rebuffed, prepares and serves dinner to Jeff, who is also, like Mrs. Thorwald, an invalid. Though Jeff seems to identify himself with Thorwald as the hen-pecked husband in a bad marriage, Hitchcock complicates this identification by likening Jeff, as ungrateful, cranky invalid, to Mrs. Thorwald. The sequence clearly confounds any simple theory of projection that might reduce the relationship between the film’s foreground and background to that of one-for-one allegory.

Yes, any simple theory of projection is thus confounded. But Belton, apparently without realizing the full implications of his argument, has done a good job of providing us with a simple theory of inversion. The Thorwalds represent a looking-glass view of Jeff and Lisa, a negative image to Jeff and Lisa’s positive one. Notice Belton’s use of the word mirroring. Here’s our metaphor, folks. Mirrors reflect, and a reflection is a copy of an original image that has been reversed. Thus the roles in the two apartments of husband and wife, caretaker and invalid, are opposite. The nature of the respective relationships are similarly polarized: the Thorwalds are a tragic couple, Jeff and Lisa operate in the sphere of comedy.

[the Belton essay is available in Hitchcock's Rereleased Films: From Rope to Vertigo, edited by Raubicheck and Srebnick. I have quoted from page 86 of the 1991 paperback edition. My citation from Brill was taken from page 73].