Comfy, Cozy Cinema 2024 - Rear Window

Comfy, Cozy Cinema is a collaboration of Lisa from Boondock Ramblings and Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs.
They have a list of movies to watch for September and October. I was late to the game and not having subscribed to any streaming platforms, I probably wouldn't have been able to watch everything, anyway - but of course "Rear Window" is one of the Hitchcock movies in my old-fashioned DVD collection.

Copyrighted by Paramount International. Artists(s) not known. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Get ready for a few spoilers, so if you have actually managed to miss the movie until now, you may not want to read any further, I'm not going to give the end away this time, though.

What would you do if you were in a cast that makes it really hard for you to get around at all, so you spend most of your recovery time in a wheelchair in your apartment?
(Overthinking segment: Would they even use a cast like that today? I had to do some quick googling and from what it looks like that's very rare. Overthinking finished.)
If you were a successful and high energy photographer, you would probably not be happy beading or stitching or whatever one of us may do for distraction. L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies is such a photographer, and being stuck in his hot apartment like that and bored, he is spending his time on watching the little world he can see through his window - meaning he is spying on his neighbors, the pretty young dancer, the composer working on a new piece of music, the newlyweds, the childless couple with the little dog, the lonely woman, the sculptor, and then there are the man and his ill wife who hardly ever gets out of bed.

Lisa is Jeff's girlfriend, a beautiful model who regularly comes to visit, and then there is Stella, the nurse.
At first both of them disapprove of Jeff's spying very much, but then they too get drawn in more and more, especially when the ill wife suddenly disappears.
Jeff is convinced that her husband has murdered and dismembered her, and the more they see, so are Lisa and Stella. He asks an old friend for help who is working for the police now, but whose enquiries don't turn anything up except that Mr. Thorwald has taken his wife to the train and that she has already sent a postcard.
So they decide to find out as much as possible by themselves, provoking Thorwald hoping he will make a mistake, and Lisa even goes to search his apartment which puts her in danger while Jeff and Stella watch it in horror, not being able to help.
Lisa gets away, but unfortunately that way Thorwald finds out he's being watched and from where and he has to act ...

"Rear Window" is based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich, "It Had To Be Murder" from 1942 which I hadn't known before, but now read for this post. Not necessarily a good idea, but in this case I'm fine with it. Although there are differences, I get why there had to be in order to pad the story for a feature film, in a good way, too.
Neither Lisa nor Stella are there in the story, instead there's the day houseman Sam, but actually the ladies being there tells us a lot about Jeff which you don't have in the story
For example, Jeff is afraid of being tied down by marriage thinking that his lifestyle of a travelling photographer and that of socialite Lisa won't go together. Lisa, on the other hand, does everything now to prove to him that there is more to her than just being beautiful. Stella in her practical way doesn't hold back saying things out loud that the others may just hint at, be it about marriage or possible details of the murder.

All of the neighbors actually don't play a role in the short story. They are mentioned at the beginning, but the focus is on Jeff and on Thorwald which I felt gives the story an even more isolated feel.
In the movie Jeff is a part of this neighborhood which he can only see through his window for the moment, watching all those small stories develop, however individually as there is no neighborly interaction at the time.
That is also most of what we see (except for one scene that shows the yard from all sides and has all the neighbors coming to the windows), we become voyeurs through Jeff's eyes, then we see his reaction to what happens out there. The movie never moves away from this yard.
In a making-of about the movie, the assistent director said they had one scene in the office of Jeff's editor, but that he told Hitchcock he thought they shouldn't use it, and so in the end they didn't.

I asked family what they had to say about the movie without thinking for too long and I got "suspense, great shots, a beautiful woman, great clothes".
I can only agree and think Edith Head's designs do deserve mentioning. The clothes she put on Grace Kelly were absolutely gorgeous and I swoon over the one she is wearing when you see her for the first time.

I do have one small complaint, though.
In the short story Mrs. Thorwald is chronically ill (probably, after all Jeff never meets her), but she is neither bickering nor laughing at her husband. Showing her doing that in the movie seems to be hinting at him just having enough of that, Jeff even mentions the fighting to his detective friend. The unconfirmed theory in the short story is that Thorwald probably got insurance for her and killed her when she caught him out trying to slowly poison her hoping to get a new life with his mistress. Nothing points at her having provoked anything.

I won't be there next time when (the real ;-)) Lisa and Erin will be watching another Hitchcock movie with Grace Kelly, "Dial M For Murder", because I don't own that movie and I don't like to talk about it just from memory, but I will definitely be heading over to their blogs.