Rear Window (1954) on Netflix
A broken leg keeps photographer Jeff Jefferies at his Greenwich Village rear window through a sweltering summer, watching the neighbors. Across the courtyard, a salesman's wife disappears.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb8.4/10574,168 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes99%
Trailer
Plot summary
Confined to his Greenwich Village apartment by a broken leg, photographer Jeff Jefferies passes a heat wave in his wheelchair at the rear window. Across the courtyard he watches a dancer, a songwriter, newlyweds and Lars Thorwald, a salesman with a bedridden wife. His nurse Stella visits, and his girlfriend Lisa Fremont, a model and socialite, stays for dinner until talk turns to the future and they quarrel, because Jeff sees no way to reconcile his traveling life with hers. Jeff hears a scream one night, then watches Thorwald make repeated trips out carrying his sample case. By morning the wife is gone, and Thorwald scours a large knife and a handsaw while movers haul away a trunk. Jeff, Stella and Lisa begin studying the courtyard with binoculars and a long lens.
Cast
- Rand Harperas Newlywed
Show all 20 cast
- Havis Davenportas Newlywed
- James Cornellas (uncredited)
- Don Dunningas Detective (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Rear Window (1954)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Rear Window was one of five Hitchcock films for Paramount whose rights reverted to him after eight years, and he pulled all five from circulation for almost 20 years, until Universal bought them in 1983 for a rumored $6 million.
- The film's famous uninterrupted 90-second opening, which introduces Jefferies and his neighborhood, required many rehearsals and ten takes over half a day of filming.
- The film was shot on stage 18 at Paramount on an enormous indoor set replicating a Greenwich Village courtyard; designers Hal Pereira and Joseph MacMillan Johnson spent six weeks on it, making it the largest set of its kind at Paramount, with a drainage system for the rain sequence.
- Franz Waxman is credited with the score, but he wrote only the opening and closing titles and the songwriter's tune "Lisa"; it was his last score for Hitchcock, who otherwise used diegetic music and courtyard sounds.
- In 1990 the ownership of Woolrich's original story rights went to the U.S. Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, which also involved Stewart and Hitchcock's estate; the outcome made litigant Sheldon Abend a credited producer of the 1998 remake.
- The Sheldon Abend Trust sued Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks, Viacom and Universal in 2008, claiming the modern-day retelling Disturbia violated the Woolrich copyright; a 2010 court ruled Disturbia did not infringe.
- A 1998 TV remake moved the story to a paralyzed lead living in a high-tech home and cast Christopher Reeve, himself paralyzed since a 1995 horse-riding accident, in the lead role.
- Taylor Swift has referenced the film repeatedly: she wears a dress in her "Me!" video modeled on one of Edith Head's designs for Grace Kelly, and said the film's voyeurism inspired the storytelling of her album Folklore.
