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26 Backyard Ethics Hitchcock’s Rear Window Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest movie, Rear Window, is as fresh as it was when it came out—in part, paradoxically, because of how profoundly it belongs to its own period. It’s set in Greenwich Village during a sweltering summer of open windows , and it reeks of 1954. (Robert A. Harris’s restored version is so beautiful and precise it almost makes up for his botch of Hitchcock’s Vertigo a few years back.) Peter Bogdanovich notes in Who the Devil Made It that Hitchcock ‘‘didn’t use a score’’ in the movie, ‘‘only source music and local sounds,’’ which isn’t exactly true. In fact, we get quite traditional theme music from Franz Waxman behind the opening credits, and, more important, the film subtly integrates hit tunes of the mid-50s into the ambient sound track, most noticeably ‘‘Mona Lisa’’ and ‘‘That’s Amore,’’ which had been introduced the previous year by Dean Martin in another Paramount picture, The Caddy. The only serious flaw in Rear Window is the hokey use of a song to resolve a couple of subplots—which audiences in 1954 didn’t find convincing either. When this romantic comedy-thriller was made, TV hadn’t yet posed a serious threat to radio, much less to movies, and there’s nary a TV set or TV screen in sight. The movie’s overall narrative form of scanning past windows in a courtyard seems to anticipate channel surfing, but it also reflects the way one turns a radio knob, tuning in and out of frequencies while the station indicator moves horizontally or vertically along the dial. The same pattern is apparent in the beautifully calibrated camera movements as well as the brilliantly mixed and nuanced sound recording. Turning a radio knob is actually the first decisive act by anyone in Rear Window. The camera briefly scans the courtyard that will remain the movie’s only location, showing the hero—L. B. Jefferies (James Stewart), better known as Jeff— fast asleep in the 92-degree morning heat. Then we see a composer (Ross Bagdasarian ) across the way shaving, sufficiently irritated by a radio commercial (‘‘Men, are you over forty? When you wake up in the morning, do you feel tired and run-down? Do you have that listless feeling?’’) to switch stations to a rumba. The sound of an alarm clock shifts the focus to a middle-aged couple a few apartments away waking up on their fire escape, where they’ve bedded down CLASSICS 27 to beat the heat. (In 1954 air conditioners were of course about as common as TV sets.) Then the camera dips down and to the left to show a curvy ballet dancer (Georgine Darcy) doing exercises while getting dressed—a musical-comedy heroine and va-va-voom 50s sex object, subsequently labeled ‘‘Miss Torso’’ by Jeff— before returning to Jeff and panning down to his left leg, which is in a plaster cast. It then crosses the room to show us succinctly who he is and how he broke his leg: we see a broken camera in front of a photograph of a racing-car accident, followed by other framed news photos, a negative close-up of a female model, and stacks of the Life-like magazine Jeff works for, with a positive image of the model’s photo on the cover. This introduction to Jeff reminds us of Hitchcock’s roots in silent cinema, but the highly developed sense of being current never falters. Some of this impression undoubtedly comes from the bantering dialogue of screenwriter John Michael Hayes, adapting a Cornell Woolrich story about an invalid so that it features more glamorous characters; Jeff’s girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), a chic, wealthy fashion buyer and former model, was apparently based in part on Hayes’s own fashionmodel wife. Hayes was a radio writer with a flair for romantic comedy, at least in his first three scripts for Hitchcock—Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and the underrated and uncharacteristically utopian The Trouble with Harry—and he had a light touch that was never matched by Hitchcock’s subsequent screenwriters, with the exception of Ernest Lehman, who scripted North by Northwest and Family Plot. The high-gloss sophistication and wit extends to the treatment of sex in the movie, which is a lot more daring than most other Hollywood films of the period. When Lisa announces to Jeff that she...

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