Movie info
| Languages: | English |
| Filming dates: | 29 November 1953 - 14 January 1954 |
| Budget: | USD 1,000,000 |
| Gross: |
USA - 906,417 USD (16 October 1983) Worldwide - 30,000,000 USD (January 1998) |
| Plot: | In New York, the daring photographer L. B. Jefferies has been confined to his small apartment for five weeks in a wheelchair with one broken leg. He snoops his neighbors from his rear window to kill time and he is aware of the personal dramas of some of them. His fancy girlfriend Lisa Carol Fremont is pressing him to marry her but he believes she will not fit and feel comfortable with his brash lifestyle. When the invalid wife of the salesman Lars Thorwald vanishes, Jeff believes the man might have killed his wife. He tells his concerns to Lisa and to his nurse Stella and the women agree with his observations, but his friend Detective Thomas J. Doyle finds reasonable explanation for each remark. However, Lisa decides to go further in her investigation, getting closer to the suspect. |
View Online
Tags
Original Soundtracks
|
"Excerpt from Fancy Free'" (uncredited) Ballet Music by 'Leonard Bernstein "To See You (Is to Love You)" (uncredited) Music by Jimmy Van Heusen Lyrics by Johnny Burke Performed by Bing Crosby Played when Miss Lonelyhearts has dinner with her imaginary guest "Lisa" (uncredited) Music by Franz Waxman Lyrics by Harold Rome "That's Amore" (uncredited) Music by Harry Warren (piano instrumental) "Mona Lisa" (uncredited) Written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston Sung by cast members during the cocktail party scene in the pianist's studio "Instrumental excerpt from Red Garters'" (uncredited) Written by 'Jay Livingston and Ray Evans "Many Dreams Ago" (uncredited) Music by Franz Waxman Lyrics by Mack David Played when Miss Lonelyhearts goes out to the restaurant across the street |
Goofs
|
FAIR: Early on, Jeff wheels himself over to the window and bumps his leg (the one in the cast) against the wall below the window, yet he doesn't grimace at all. Once a broken leg in a cast begins healing, it's no more sensitive to such bumps than an uninjured leg. Continuity: When Lisa places her slippers into her overnight case (while sitting on Jeff's lap), they are tossed in, more to the side of the case. Later, when the detective views the suitcase, the slippers are neatly placed and sitting upright. Continuity: When Jeff is getting back into the wheelchair after Stella has given him a massage, his pajama top jumps from being unbuttoned to buttoned between shots. Continuity: When Jeff grabs the box of flashbulbs, all four can be seen in the box. But when he backs up more, there are only two left. Continuity: Lisa takes the binoculars away from Jeff and wraps the neck cord around them before putting them on a small cupboard. When Jeff picks up the binoculars later, the neck cord is no longer wrapped around them. Continuity: The amount of Brandy in the detective's glass increases between shots. Continuity: When Lisa goes to Jeff's house to celebrate his last week with his cast, she places two candles onto the table next to him, the candles are not lit. A little later in the same scene, Lisa walks into the kitchen, and when she returns, the candles are lit. Continuity: The location and angle of the shadows of the "sun" are in the same place at in the morning and at night. Continuity: At the end of Jeff's first massage, Stella places the bottle with the green liquid on the side table without replacing the cap. As Stella is packing to leave, the bottle is capped as she places it in her bag. SYNC: While Lisa and Stella are digging up the flowers (about 92 minute mark) the pianist is shown playing with other musicians. When the harmonica players starts to play, a saxophone is heard although none is visible. The harmonica is subsequently heard also. SYNC: At 00.52.52: When Jefferies' nurse goes to the door saying she's going to find out the name of the freight carrier that is taking off with the trunk, someone who sounds nothing like James Stewart has dubbed him with the peculiar sounding line "I'll keep an eye on the alley". Jimmy Stewart is holding the binoculars over his mouth but we can see that he's not moving his lips! Prior to that, when he says "don't do anything foolish" his lips are still moving after the audio is heard. Continuity: When Thorwald returns home from one of his trips out in the rain lugging his suitcase, the camera (from Jeff's point of view) pans from a glimpse of Thorwald in the street, across Miss Torso's apartment where she is preparing to go to bed, to the second floor hallway where Thorwald is walking toward his apartment. This observed action takes only a few seconds - an impossibly short time frame for Thorwald to have entered his building through its front door, walked over to the stairwell, climbed the stairs to the second floor and then be seen walking along the second floor hallway. Fact errors: SPOILER: The image retention effect depicted in Jeff's apartment, when he fires the flashbulbs to temporarily blind Thorwald, is based upon the color of the light source. The type of flashbulbs used were a Clear type, appearing bluish to the eye, not red as the POV shots indicate. Continuity: When Jeff is watching Miss Lonleyhearts, and drinks a silent toast to her, he has drunk almost all of the wine in the glass. Seconds later, the glass is somewhat more than half full. Continuity: The detective accidentally throws his brandy over himself, soaking his shirt and jacket. In the next scene, seconds later, as he is about to leave the apartment, his clothes all appear bone dry. Crew: After Lisa sees Thorwald tie up the trunk, and the camera dollies forward to a close up, there are creaks from the floorboards and footsteps heard from the camera crew. Fact errors: The Exakta camera used in this movie is usually held in a way that would suggest that the shutter is triggered on the right-side upward surface, as is normal for most cameras. 35mm Exakta cameras actually have the shutter release on the front of the camera, just left of the lens. Continuity: When Lisa is talking to Jeff about his photography work, at one point, both hands are holding her wine glass, but in the next shot, only her right hand is holding the glass. |
Quotes
|
Stella: When two people love each other, they come together - WHAM - like two taxis on Broadway. Lisa: How's your leg? Jeff: Hurts a little. Lisa: Your stomach? Jeff: Empty as a football. Lisa: And your love life? Jeff: Not too active. Lisa: Anything else bothering you? Jeff: Uh-huh, who are you? Jeff: She wants me to marry her. Stella: That's normal. Jeff: I don't want to. Stella: That's abnormal. Lisa: Today's a very special day. Jeff: It's just another run-of-the-mill Wednesday. The calendar's full of 'em. Jeff: When am I going to see you again? Lisa: [angry] Not for a long time... [softening] at least not until tomorrow night. Jeff: Why would a man leave his apartment three times on a rainy night with a suitcase and come back three times? Lisa: He likes the way his wife welcomes him home. Lisa: I wish I were creative. Jeff: You are. You're great at creating difficult situations. Jeff: [into the phone] He killed a dog last night because the dog was scratching around in the garden. You know why? Because he had something buried in that garden that the dog scented. Lt. Doyle: [voice] Like an old hambone? Jeff: I don't know what pet names Thorwald had for his wife. Lisa: The last thing Mrs. Thorwald would leave behind would be her wedding ring. Stella, do you ever leave yours at home? Stella: The only way somebody would get that would be to chop off my - finger. Let's go down to the garden and find out what's buried there. Lisa: Why not? I always wanted to meet Mrs. Thorwald. Jeff: Those two yellow zinnias at the end, they're shorter now. Now since when do flowers grow shorter over the course of two weeks? Something's buried there. Lisa: Mrs. Thorwald! Stella: You haven't spent much time around cemeteries, have you? It's impossible that Mr. Thorwald could bury his wife in a hole the size of one square foot. Unless he put her in standing on end, in which case he wouldn't need the knives and saw. Lt. Doyle: How do you do? Lisa: We think Thorwald's guilty. Lisa: A woman never goes anywhere but the hospital without packing makeup, clothes, and jewelry. Lisa: What's a logical explanation for a woman taking a trip with no luggage? Jeff: That she didn't know she was going on a trip and where she was going she wouldn't need any luggage. Lisa: Exactly. Stella: Intelligence. Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence. Lisa: You can't ignore the wife dissapearing, and the trunk, and the jewelery. Lt. Doyle: I checked the railroad station. Yesterday at 6:20 am, he bought a ticket. Ten minutes later, he put his wife on a train. Destination: Meritsville. I asure you, the witnesses are that deep. Lisa: That might have been a woman, but it couldn't have been Mrs. Thorwald. That jewelery... Lt. Doyle: Look, Miss Fremont, that feminine intuition stuff sells magazines, but in real life it's still a fairy tale. I don't know how many times I chased down leads based on women's intuition. Lisa: Jeff, you know if someone came in here, they wouldn't believe what they'd see? You and me with long faces plunged into despair because we find out a man didn't kill his wife. We're two of the most frightening ghouls I've ever known. Lisa: What's he doing? Cleaning house? Jeff: He's washing and scrubbing down the bathroom walls. Stella: Must've splattered a lot. [both Jeff and Lisa look at Stella with disgust] Stella: Come on, that's what were all thinkin'. He killed her in there, now he has to clean up those stains before he leaves. Lisa: Stella... your choice of words! Stella: Nobody ever invented a polite word for a killin' yet. Lisa: Tell me exactly what you saw and what you think it means. Lisa: According to you, people should be born, live, and die in the same place. Stella: We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes sir. How's that for a bit of homespun philosophy? Jeff: Readers Digest, April 1939. Stella: Well, I only quote from the best. Lisa: A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window. Stella: You'd think the rain would've cooled things down. All it did was make the heat wet. Jeff: [Lisa wants to be part of Jeff's globe-trotting life of adventure] You don't sleep much, you bathe even less and you'd have to eat things that you wouldn't want to look at while they were alive. Lisa: I'm not much on rear window ethics. Lt. Doyle: Lars Thorwald... is no more a murderer than I am. Jeff: [stunned] You mean that you can explain everything strange that has been going on over there, and is still going on? Lt. Doyle: No, and neither can you. That's a secret private world your looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn't possibly explain in public. Lisa: Like killing their wives? Lt. Doyle: Get that idea out of your head. It will only lead you in the wrong direction. Stella: Every man's ready to get married when the right girl comes along. Stella: I can hear you now: "Get out of my life, you wonderful woman. You're too good for me." Lt. Doyle: You didn't see the killing or the body. How do you know there was a murder? Jeff: Because everything this fellow's done has been suspicious: trips at night in the rain, knifes, saws, trunks with rope, and now this wife that isn't there anymore. Lt. Doyle: I admit it does have a mysterious sound. But it could be any number of things for the wife disappearing. Murder is the least part. Jeff: Now, Doyle, don't tell me that he's just an unemployed magician amusing the neighborhood with his sleight of hand. Don't tell me that. [first lines] Voice on radio: Men, are you over 40? When you wake up in the morning, do you feel tired and rundown? Do you have that listless feeling... [the camera pans around the courtyard; cut to later in the day] Jeff: [answering phone] Jefferies. Gunnison: Congratulations, Jeff! Jeff: For what? Gunnison: For getting rid of that cast! Jeff: Who said I was getting rid of it? Gunnison: This is Wednesday; seven weeks from the day you broke your leg. Yes or no? Jeff: Gunnison, how did you ever get to be such a big editor with such a small memory? Gunnison: By thrift, industry, and hard work... and, uh, catching the publisher with his secretary. Did I get the wrong day? Jeff: No... no, wrong week. *Next* Wednesday I emerge from this plaster cocoon. Jeff: I get myself half killed for you and you reward me by stealing my assignments. Gunnison: I didn't ask you to stand in the middle of that automobile racetrack. Jeff: You asked for a, something dramatically different. You got it. Gunnison: So did you. Gunnison: It's about time you got married, before you turn into a lonesome and bitter old man. Jeff: Yeah, can't you just see me, rushing home to a hot apartment to listen to the automatic laundry and the electric dishwasher and the garbage disposal and the nagging wife... Gunnison: Jeff, wives don't nag anymore. They discuss. Jeff: Oh, is that so, is that so? Well, maybe in the high-rent district they discuss. In my neighborhood they still nag. Stella: The New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse. Jeff: Oh, hello, Stella. Stella: And they got no windows in the workhouse. Stella: You heard of that market crash in '29? I predicted that. Jeff: Oh, just how did you do that, Stella? Stella: Oh, simple. I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said. Nerves, I said. And I asked myself, "What's General Motors got to be nervous about?" Overproduction, I says; collapse. When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country's ready to let go. Jeff: She's too perfect, she's too talented, she's too beautiful, she's too sophisticated, she's too everything but what I want. Stella: Is, um, what you want something you can discuss? Stella: When I married Miles, we were both a couple of maladjusted misfits. We are still maladjusted misfits, and we have loved every minute of it. Jeff: Would you fix me a sandwich, please? Stella: Yes, I will. And I'll spread a little common sense on the bread. [describing a dress] Lisa: A steal at $1,100. Jeff: Eleven hundred? They ought to list that dress on the stock exchange. Jeff: She's like a queen bee with her pick of the drones. Lisa: I'd say she's doing a woman's hardest job: juggling wolves. Jeff: She sure is the "eat, drink and be merry" girl. Stella: Yeah, she'll wind up fat, alcoholic and miserable. Stella: Maybe one day she'll find her happiness. Jeff: Yeah, some man'll lose his. Jeff: I just can't figure it. He went out several times last night in the rain carrying his sample case. Stella: Well, he's a salesman, isn't he? Jeff: Well, what would he be selling at three o'clock in the morning? Stella: Flashlights. Luminous dials for watches. House numbers that light up. Stella: He's gonna run out on her, the coward. Jeff: Sometimes it's worse to stay than it is to run. Lt. Doyle: Jeff, you've got a lot to learn about homicide. Why, morons have committed murders so shrewdly that it's taken a hundred trained police minds to catch them. Jeff: Are you interested in solving this case or in making me look foolish? Lt. Doyle: Well, if possible, both. Jeff: Well then, do a good job of it. Go over there and search Thorwald's apartment. The whole place must be knee-deep in evidence. Lt. Doyle: I can't do that. Jeff: No, I mean not right now. Just wait for a while until he goes out later for drink or a paper or something. What he doesn't know woun't hurt him. Lt. Doyle: I can't do that even if he isn't there. Jeff: Why not? Does he have a curtesy card from the local police department? Lt. Doyle: Now don't get me angry. This is America. Not even a detective can just walk into an apartment and search it. Why personaly, if I was caught in there, they'd have my badge within 10 minutes. Jeff: Then make sure you don't get caught, that's all. If you find something, you have a murder. They'd probaly not care very much about a few broken house rules. If you don't find anything, the fellow's clear. Jeff: What do you need as evidence? Bloody footprints leading up to his door? Lt. Doyle: One thing I don't need is heckling. You called me and asked for help. Now you're behaving like a taxpayer. Jeff: You know by tomorrow morning, there may not be any evidence left in that apartment, you know that? Lt. Doyle: A detective's worst nightmare. Lisa: Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that? Jeff: He gets it from the landlady once a month. Lt. Doyle: What do you say we all sit down and have a nice friendly drink too, hmm? Forget all about this. We can tell lies about the good old days during the war. Lisa: So that's it? You're through with the case? Lt. Doyle: There is no case to be solved. There never was. Lt. Doyle: Oh, Jeff, if you need any more help, consult the yellow pages in your telephone directory. Lisa: Oh, I love funny exit lines. Lisa: Why would Thorwald want to kill a little dog? Because it knew too much? Stella: [to Lisa] You haven't spent much time around cemeteries, have you? Lisa: Well, if there's one thing I know, it's how to wear the proper clothes. [last lines] Newlywed woman: ...but if you'd told me you quit your job, we wouldn't have gotten married. Newlywed man: Oh, honey, come on. Detective: [referring to what was buried in Thorwald's flower bed] It's over in his apartment. In a hat box. Wanna look? Stella: Oh, no thanks - I don't want any part of her. Jeff: [shivering as cold alcohol is poured on his back before a rubdown] Say, don't you ever heat that stuff up? Stella: Aw, it gives your system something to fight against. Jeff: What about the knife and saw I saw him wrapping up in newspaper? Lt. Doyle: Do you own a saw? Jeff: Well... yeah. At home in my garage, I keep... Lt. Doyle: How many people did you cut up with it? [regarding Jeff's telephoto lens] Stella: Mind if I use that portable keyhole? Jeff: [Jeff watching Lt. Doyle staring at Miss Torso dancing in her room] How's your wife? Lisa: Did Lt. Doyle think I stole this purse? Jeff: No, Lisa, I don't think he did. Stella: How much do we need to bail Lisa from jail? Jeff: Well, this is first offense burglary, that's about $250. I have $127. Stella: Lisa's handbag. Uh... 50 cents. I got $20 or so in my purse. Jeff: And what about the rest? Stella: When those cops at the station see Lisa, they'll even contribute. Jeff: I've seen bickering and family quarrels and mysterious trips at night, and knives and saws and ropes, and now since last evening, not a sign of the wife. How do you explain that? Lisa: Maybe she died. Jeff: Where's the doctor? Where's the undertaker? |
Comments
No comments yet.
