Original subtitles

Welcome to the audio commentary for Rear Window.

I’m John Fawell,

author of Hitchcock's Rear Window: The Well-Made Film.

This film begins, as so many Hitchcock films do,

with a camera peering through a window.

Hitchcock loved to shoot through windows,

which, of course, provide excellent framing devices.

But shooting through windows also gave Hitchcock the chance

to underline the voyeurism inherent in watching a film.

The shades being raised in Jeff's windows

remind us of the curtains lifted in a theater before a performance.

And this is just one of many times in this film

that Hitchcock will draw a parallel between Jeff’s window and the movie screen,

between watching a film and being a peeping Tom.

So, in just a moment, we'll see Hitchcock’s name,

and it comes with a musical flourish,

at which point the camera will snap into action,

going through this window and taking a pan,

the first of six counter-clockwise pans around the courtyard.

Here ’3 the name.

And the flourish, and we start to move.

This is the first of six counter-clockwise pans

that Hitchcock is gonna repeat, that operate almost as chapter headings

or little breaks throughout the film.

This cat climbing the stairs introduces us

to the pan‘ of the set that we're gonna see later

when Stella and Lisa jump over that fence.

I think that’s why Hitchcock put it in there, this scene.

This is our introduction to this set.

We’re really not looking at the neighbors yet.

This is just Hitchcock giving us the lay of the land

and letting us see his set, one of the biggest of his career.

And one of his several experiments with setting films within a single location,

as he did in Rope and Lifeboat.

This is probably his most successful case of single-set location

because it’s such a rich, varied, complex set.

It allowed him to do so much more than in those other films.

Two visual clues that we’re in a heat wave.

And then our second pan around the courtyard.

This one, we meet some people in.

First, the composer, who’s going to be paralleled to Jeff many times.

He's going through something of a midlife crisis.

There, he shuts off the radio,

which is having a commercial for a male tonic.

There’s a out here in this pan, but then it becomes a pan again.

We get this visual pun.

We didn’t know that this woman was there.

Hitchcock had a real taste for visual puns, trompe I’oeils.

And our first introduction to Miss Torso,

who will be Jeff's fantasy interest.

And we'll be talking about the fact that Jeff seems to be a great deal more interested

in Miss Torso, the woman across the way,

than the beautiful Lisa Fremont, the woman that he actually has.

Maybe a commentary on men in general.

Now we’re gonna move to this great expository scene

in which Hitchcock tells us what we need to know

about how Jeff ended up with a broken leg,

and he does it without saying a word.

Hitchcock began in silent films,

and in his hean‘ he was always a silent film director,

and this is a great example.

Jeff's broken leg.

The camera that was smashed when he had the accident,

showing that he was taking a photograph.

A photograph of the accident, and its aftermath.

Other photos that establish him as a photographer,

including extra camera equipment to make sure we get that point.

He's a fashion photographer as well.

And does magazine covers,

of course, this is what Lisa would like him to do all the time.

That’s not Lisa. Some people think it is.

And this is a scene where Jeff’s editor calls him,

thinking that he is getting out of his cast today

and is free to work again.

Congratulations, Jeff.

-For what? -For getting rid of that cast.

It starts with this silly joke

of a helicopter swooping down on a couple of girls sun tanning naked

on the balcony across the way.

Here comes the helicopter.

It’s either a very silly joke,

or sometimes things happen across the way here

that are so strange

that they seem to make more sense as reflections of Jeff's thoughts

than things that actually occur in reality.

In this case, a classic case of male wish fulfillment.

Well, I guess I can’t be lucky every day.

Now, Hitchcock has a lot of fun with this scene.

He begins a game that he’s going to continue throughout the entire film,

which is establishing parallels between Jeff and Lisa

and the neighbors across the way.

Hitchcock had a great sense of unity

and felt that anything that was introduced into his film

should contribute to the central idea of the film,

which, in this case, is the romance between Jeff and Lisa.

So you get, across the way,

people who are constantly reflecting Jeff and Lisa ’3 situation.

Hitchcock liked doubles, reflections, mirror images,

dark twins, doppelgéngers.

His films are crammed with these things.

And that’s what we get across the way,

a bunch of people who are reflections, dark and light, of Jeff and Lisa,

and the whole question of being single or getting married.

I’ll give you some examples here, coming up.

Jeff’s gonna be compared here to the composer by Jeff.

He's gonna say, "Six weeks with nothing to do but look out the window. ”

And the composer's gonna be acting out his words.

Let’s watch for a second.

Now wait a minute, Gunnison. You've got to get me out of here.

Six weeks sitting in a two-room apartment

with nothing to do but look out the window at the neighbors.

-Bye, Jeff. -No, Gunnison, I...

Now that’s a small example, but here ’3 a better one.

Here's Jeff projecting himself into the Thorwald apartment and saying,

"Can't you see me coming home?"

But who we’re seeing is Lars Thorwald, the murderer. Listen.

...before you turn into a lonesome and bitter old man.

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.

Jeff projects himself into that apartment, as he will many times in this film.

And to underscore that that’s a Jeff out there,

Hitchcock makes Mrs. Thonxvald, the murder victim, soon-to-be,

a dead ringer for Jeff's girlfriend, Lisa.

She's not like any invalid I’ve ever seen.

And in fact, he puts her in the exact same negligee

that we'll see Lisa in much later in the film.

It’s a dead ringer with the exception of the little shawl Lisa will have.

One of the first of many times where Hitchcock's gonna establish

a parallel to Lisa across the way.

This is one of a couple times where Hitchcock finishes a scene

with a little comic interlude

in which Jeff tries to reach a remote scratch under his cast.

This is an example of Hitchcock as a musical director.

He felt like he had to finish every scene with some little flourish,

some little coda.

And this is the cult of the studio filmmaker,

great sense of craftsmanship on the smallest scale.

You should have a sense of resolution for every scene.

Lars Thorwald, our murderer, who also happens to be a gardener,

which is classic Hitchcock.

You might remember that in the movie Frenzy,

the murderer there also loved flowers.

Hitchcock had a notion that the more domestic you were,

the more normal and placid in the exterior, the more likely you had a hidden criminality.

He had a very cynical, at times, suspicious mind,

and the more normal a person was,

the more he felt there was a criminality implied.

So you’ll often find that the worst evil in a Hitchcock film

lurks within the most benign, suburban, placid exteriors.

Only in Hitchcock do gardens suggest something evil.

One of the lonely women across the way, the sculptress,

trying to make a connection with Thonzvald.

And he slaps her down pretty bad.

Our first indication that Thorwald may not be a very lovely man.

Well!

I do declare.

New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse.

And our introduction of Stella, the insurance nurse.

She’s preceded orally, then visually.

And played by the great character actress Thelma Ritter.

And she comes in actually saying something pretty important,

so we 7] stop and listen here for a second.

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?

Reader's Digest, April, 1939.

-Well, I only quote from the best. -Yeah.

Now Hitchcock teases Stella for her "homespun philosophy” there

because he hates to spit out messages or theses, like so much ticker tape.

But actually Stella does announce something of a central theme for this film,

which is, ”We've become a nation of peeping Toms. "

This is gonna be a film about that very subject,

how we peep too much.

It’s about a peeping Torn, Jeff,

who’s been reduced to peeping by his circumstances, of course.

But there are also tons of references in this film

to the filmgoer as a peeping Tom.

Hitchcock knows that we 're out there, just like Jeff, sitting in the dark,

looking at people who can 't see us, through a magic window

that opens us to worlds we normally don 't get to see.

And Hitchcock doesn’t let himself off the hook, either.

He had a strong consciousness that he had a streak of voyeurism, too, of course.

Like Jeff, Hitchcock lives through a camera.

This is his career. And Hitchcock knew

that he had some of his most intense relationships with women through cameras,

’cause he had so much power through a camera.

He could glamorize women, shape them.

He knew that he lived, in a way, through his camera, in terms of women,

sometimes more intensely than anywhere else.

He would often comment on the fact that, in his interviews,

cackle over the fact that he had made Jeff paralyzed from the waist down.

So you have a man here who is physically inactive

but mentally going very strong.

And maybe a little like Hitchcock,

or any artist who lives potentially too much in fantasy land.

Wheneverl think of Jeff paralyzed from the waist down,

I think of a comment Hitchcock made once

where he described himself as an adrenal type.

And he said, "That means I’m all body and only vestigial legs.

"But since my present interest in my body is from my waist up,

"that doesn’t bother me much. "

So Hitchcock, a little like Jeff,

not so active physically, very active mentally.

Now here we get to see Thelma Ritter in action.

She’s just a great comic actress, and she played this kind of role often,

a fount of working class wisdom and common sense.

She rides Jeff for a couple of reasons.

First, that he peeps too much.

Secondly, that he’s not returning Lisa Fremont’s interest.

She doesn’t get it.

Along the way, she takes a lot of potshots at Jeff,

as if to suggest he's got a weak sexuality.

Let’s listen for a second.

And Lisa Fremont is the right girl for any man with half a brain

who can get one eye open.

She's all right.

-What'd you do, have a fight? -No.

-Father loading up the shotgun? -What?

-Please, Stella. -It's happened before, you know.

Some of the world's happiest marriages

have started "under the gun," as you might say.

-No, she's just not the girl for me. -Yeah, she's only perfect.

She's too perfect. She's too talented. She's too beautiful. She's too sophisticated.

She's too everything but what I want.

Is what you want something you can discuss?

That's the kind of line that Stella will say often in this film.

And Lisa will follow suit.

They’ll often join together, taking potshots at Jeff,

suggesting that there ’s something wrong with him,

something mysterious,

why isn’t he responding to Lisa Fremont, played by Grace Kelly.

It's a point of View echoed by my male students

every time I show this film.

Now there’s a funny sequence coming up here.

Stella ’s gonna carry Jeff back to his chair.

Jeff is gonna comment about how he needs a tough woman who can travel with him,

but look at how the visual undermines the verbal.

...a new dress and a lobster dinner

or latest scandal.

I need a woman who's willing to... Hold it.

Who's willing to go anywhere and do anything and love it.

While Jeff spouts this Hemingway-esque rhetoric,

the diminutive Thelma Ritter tosses him around like a bag of potatoes.

And this is what I mean about Hitchcock, the visual always trumps the verbal.

And that's a little comment about Jeff’s rhetoric.

I don ’t think Hitchcock buys it.

When a man and a woman see each other and like each other,

they ought to come together, wham, like a couple of taxis on Broadway,

and not sit around analyzing each other like two specimens in a bottle.

Those are the kind of lines Thelma Ritter was born to deliver.

And we have to give some credit to the screenwriter, John Michael Hayes,

who had a great comic sensibility

and brought a certain light touch to Hitchcock's scripts

that he didn't have with other screenwriters.

Once it was, "See somebody, get excited, get married."

Now it's, "Read a lot of books, fence with a lot of four-syllable words..."

I wanna point out something that’s coming up

that we’re gonna see repeatedly through the film.

And that’s that Hitchcock will often introduce one scene orally

while he’s still conducting a scene that precedes that scene.

In other words, we ’re gonna hear some music pretty soon.

And it’s gonna be the introduction of the scene that follows this one.

This is the way Hitchcock has of overlapping his scenes

and covering the seams, the edits. Here it is.

...a little common sense on the bread.

Lisa's loaded to her fingertips with love for you.

It’s a carnival version of That's Amore, the old Dean Martin song.

And it's gonna serve as the backdrop to the introduction of the newlyweds.

So Hitchcock has already begun one scene before he's ended another.

He checks in with the people we've just seen.

Again, another case of overlapping before he moves on.

We’ll take a little look at Miss Torso,

and then we 7] be introduced to the newlyweds. Here they come.

[like the way this tree frames the window. It forms a mock idol.

And of course, we're peeping through two windows, not just one.

We don '2‘ really know who they are yet. We ’re gonna figure this outwith Jeff.

And his reaction shots are gonna be our guideposts.

In fact, sometimes you’ll see audiences

literally mimicking, unconsciously, these reaction shots.

That’s how effectively they tell us what to think.

He's amused here.

We’re gonna get that iconic sign of newlyweds,

the groom carrying the bride over the threshold.

Again, Hitchcock arriving at a visual way

to get across his information, silent film directing.

And Jeff’s reaction shots will tell us just what to think.

First-person camera followed by reaction shots

is Hitchcock's one-two punch.

Now the bride is going to look at us in the eyes here,

and Jeff, in a moment.

See? We're caught peeping. It happens often in Hitchcock.

And the groom’s gonna shut the shades, and that’s it for our view

of the newlyweds for quite a while.

Window shopper.

Here is our third counter-clockwise pan.

I mentioned before, Hitchcock loves to follow the same terrain.

But he's not really interested in looking at the people in this pan.

This is a musical pan, a rhythmic.

It’s meant as an introduction to the arrival of Lisa Fremont,

played by Grace Kelly,

who comes swooping down on Jeff in a dreamlike kiss.

She arrives first as a shadow.

A first-person shot of her swooping down, and this shadow again,

almost like he’s waking from a dream to another dream.

First-person shot again.

And then this lovely step-print process profile.

Step-print process is a method in which film is advanced intermittently,

each frame exposed in a stationary state.

Hitchcock took great care with his kisses.

His romance was certainly every bit as important to him as his suspense.

Probably more so, really.

-And your love life? -Not too active.

Anything else bothering you?

Who are you?

And we’re gonna get another introduction to Lisa.

She comes really in a one-two punch.

First, close-up, and then far shot,

’cause she's gonna walk around Jeff's apartment like a model on the catwalk.

Carol

Fremont.

Is this the Lisa Fremont who never wears the same dress twice?

With a very artificial pose here,

which has to be almost a joking reference to Grace Kelly's career as a model

that preceded her career as an actress.

Or it ma y just be Hitchcock taking the opportunity

to just show how beautiful Grace Kelly is.

We should note that Lisa’s gonna make that exact same walk later on in the film,

from lamp to lamp to lamp.

Another example of Hitchcock repeating his patterns.

He likes to get us rooted in certain paths that he has

so we feel nice and grounded in his set.

Now, needless to say, the fashion sense in this film is superb.

And that’s due to three reasons.

One is Edith Head, the costume designer, one of the best in the business.

The second is Lisa, Grace Kelly,

who, by all accounts, had a great deal to do with these outfits.

But most of all, it has to do with Hitchcock,

who thought long and hard and planned a great deal for his outfits.

Edith Head said about Hitchcock that,

”Every costume was indicated when he sent me the finished script.

"There was a reason for every color, every style.

"For one scene, he saw Lisa in pale green, for another in white chiffon,

"for another in gold.

"He was really putting a dream together in the studio. ”

And these outfits were important to Hitchcock,

who had an impeccable fashion sense

and also a great desire to make Lisa, or Grace Kelly, look as good as he could.

You have, perhaps, an ambulance downstairs?

No, better than that. '21 .'

Thank you for waiting, Carl. The kitchen's right there on the left.

This would be the dream of white chiffon.

She brings in an air of Manhattan with her tonight,

as she brings home this dinner from 21.

Just put everything in the oven, Carl, on low.

-Yes, madam. -Let's open the wine now.

All right.

It's a Montrachet.

A great big glassful. There's a corkscrew right over there.

Here, I'll do it.

-Big enough? -Yeah, they're fine.

I can't think of anything more boring or tiresome than what you've been through,

-and the last week must be the hardest. -Let me, sir.

All right.

Yeah, I want to get this thing off and get moving.

Well, I'm going to make this a week you'll never forget.

Fine, thanks.

Just a minute, Carl.

-This will take care of the taxi as well. -Thank you, Miss Fremont.

-Have a pleasant dinner, Mr. Jefferies. -All right. Good night.

Good night.

This is the scene where Lisa and Jeff have their first conflict.

Lisa would like Jeff to stay in New York,

get a job as a fashion photographer, settle down and marry her.

Jeff finds this idea laughable and has no interest.

In fact, he really is thinking and looking for a way to break up with Lisa.

So this scene is gonna end up sadly.

And that’s significant, because this is the first example,

we’re gonna see this very often in the film,

of how Hitchcock will set a mood within the apartment with Jeff and Lisa

that's gonna carry over to the apartments across the way.

So this conversation ’s gonna end very sadly

with Jeff cruelly treating Lisa.

And then we’re going to segue to Miss Lonelyhearts

and her very sad sequence.

One of the first of many connections between Lisa and Miss Lonelyhearts.

But the mood of this apartment wafts into the apartments across the way.

"Isn’t it time you came home?" says Lisa right here,

as they settle before the newlywed window.

Isn't it time you came home? You could pick your assignment.

-I wish there was one I wanted. -Make the one you want.

-You mean leave the magazine? -Yes.

-For what? -For yourself and me.

I could get you a dozen assignments tomorrow.

Fashions, portraits.

-Don't laugh. I could do it. -That's what I'm afraid of.

Can you see me driving down to the fashion salon in ajeep...

Now Jeff will finish with some cruel shots.

I could see you looking very handsome and successful in a dark blue flannel suit.

Let's stop talking nonsense, shall we?

Guess I'd better start setting up for dinner.

Now you hear the music. This is another one of these careful segues.

The music for the next scene has begun before this one has ended.

This is Hitchcock overlapping and covering his seams again.

So this finishes sadly, and we move to a sad scene.

And this scene has really begun because the music began.

It’s a song called To See You Is to Love You.

It’s Bing Crosby’s version.

We start outwith the instrumental.

The lyrics will begin with Miss Lonelyhearts’ pantomime here.

To See You Is to Love You is what I would call a cruelly ironic song for this scene,

because, of course, we’re looking at a woman who's semi-delusional

and pretending a man is there.

To See You Is to Love You.

Though it might be a comment on Jeff's voyeurism, too,

who seems to be so interested in the people he watches.

Of course, these windows across the way allowed Hitchcock

to do one of his favorite things,

which is traffic in silent film.

These are all little silent films,

which allows him to work where he thought it was most important to work,

in the purely visual.

Miss Lonelyhean‘s, in particular, with her melodramatic situation,

reminds us of silent films in that the acting, the exaggerated mimicry,

this is so much like silent film acting.

She looks like Lillian Gish here, tendering her cheek for a kiss.

I find that when people watch this scene, they’re rapt.

This is one of the moments in which the audience

is most quiet, most engrossed in the film.

Of course, we have to note, if you'd been watching the background,

that Lisa ’3 doing the same thing Miss Lonelyhearts is, setting a table.

If you wanna carry the metaphor further,

you can say setting a table for a man who’s not really there.

And Jeff, ironically, is going to toast Miss Lonelyhearts,

for whom he feels a great deal of empathy.

But pretty soon he’ll be back at the dinner table,

making Lisa feel miserable.

Just one of many cases where he seems to feel more for the women across the way

than the woman in his life,

where he seems to live in fantasy more than in reality.

Her sequence finishes exactly with the words,

”The lyrics are over and so is her fantasy, ” as she crumbles.

Notice how Lisa appears out of nowhere in the reaction shot.

She’s always very fascinated by Miss Lonelyhean‘s' window.

That’s Lisa ’3 way of saying, ”No, that is my apartment, Jeff. "

And that’s another case in which Hitchcock puts Lisa across the way.

Lisa sees a good deal of herself in Miss Lonelyhearts.

Now, Jeff, on the other hand, compares her to this woman.

He says, "No, you're a little like Miss Torso. ”

Which is rather rude, really, considering he thinks of her

as a flirtatious gold digger.

I'd say she's doing a woman's hardestjob. Juggling wolves.

Of course, Lisa and Miss Torso do have a lot in common.

They’re young, they're blonde, they both have to juggle wolves,

they’re women involved in the arts.

Hitchcock draws some parallels.

Lisa sees an entirely different Miss Torso than Jeff does.

She sees a woman who’s balancing a bunch of men,

keeping them at bay, waiting for her true love to come home.

Which turns out to be correct,

because there ’3 a nebbishy soldier returning from the war

at the end of the film, Stanley.

She's not in love with him or any of them.

Oh, how can you tell that from here?

You said it resembled my apartment, didn't you?

I hope they're cooked this time.

You notice the song has winded down now.

That little pop video is over and we're on to something else.

Lars Thonivald giving his wife dinner.

You wouldn't have heard her, but she said, "I hope they're cooked this time. "

She's an irritable wife.

She throws the flower that he put on the table on her bed.

She's not at all impressed with his kindness. She’s onto him.

He thinks he’s got her taken care of right now, but he hasn’t.

She’s gonna sneak over and listen.

And she knows that he's talking to his mistress.

She seems to know that he’s having an affair.

She may even know that they're planning something violent.

We can’t tell for certain.

And, again, here ’3 a good chance for you to see

how much this woman is a double of Lisa.

And, again, that nightgown is the same one.

It's not just similar, it’s the same nightgown.

The only difference with Lisa '5 is that she'll wear a little transparent shawl with hers.

So Hitchcock's very clear that this is meant to be an image of Lisa.

It’s a sad moment as they wind down into a nasty fight.

But you get this lovely music for counterpoint.

And here comes Hitchcock's cameo.

There he is, winding a clock in the composer's room.

He's gonna turn and, according to my lip-reading students, say,

”B, B-flat. "

Where's that wonderful music coming from?

Some songwriter over there in the studio apartment.

Lisa has a strong feeling for this music.

This is something Hitchcock emphasizes over and over again.

Listen to what she says.

Oh, it's enchanting.

It's almost as if it were being written especially for us.

No wonder he's having so much trouble with it.

That's a very funny line, because, of course, it is being written especially for them.

It’s the theme song of the film.

We’ll find out later that it’s called Lisa. We 7] hear the lyrics at the end.

And they're comprised mostly of the word ”Lisa. "

So that's one of those cases in Hitchcock films

where the characters seem to almost know they're characters within a fiction.

This sequence finishes with one more insult by Jeff,

and Lisa sadly sitting down to the forlorn sound of her own theme song.

and Lisa sadly sitting down to the forlorn sound of her own theme song.

We all eat, talk, drink, laugh, wear clothes.

Well, now look...

If you're saying all this because you don't want to tell me the truth,

because you're hiding something from me, then maybe I can understand.

-l'm not hiding anything. It'sjust that... -It doesn't make sense.

There’s another one of those moments where Stella and Lisa seem to mock Jeff.

They're always suggesting there’s something he’s hiding,

there’s something he can’t talk about.

There’s gotta be some strange reason

he’s not interested in the most beautiful woman in New York.

This is an interesting sequence. They’re shot so differently.

Lisa is ensconced so comfortably on this group of pillows,

bathed in a warm light, her skirt laid out,

with great baroque folds.

Jeff, on the other hand, is shot from this very oblique angle,

with that lampshade squished in the foreground.

It's very cold and sterile,

maybe a reflection of his coldness in this scene.

Reminds us that Hitchcock has his roots in Expressionist cinema.

He was quite influenced by German Expressionism as a young man.

Well, you might have to if you went with me.

Did you ever try to keep warm in a C-54 at 15,000 feet, 20 degrees below zero?

Oh, Ido it all the time. Whenever I have a few minutes after lunch.

Did you ever get shot at? Did you ever get run over?

Did you ever get sandbagged at night

because somebody got unfavorable publicity from your camera?

Did you ever... Those high heels, they'll be great in the jungle.

And the nylons and those six-ounce lingerie.

-Three. -All right, three.

They'll make a big hit in Finland, just before you freeze to death.

Well, if there's one thing I know, it's how to wear the proper clothes.

Yeah, yeah.

This is a theme that’s gonna run throughout the film.

Lisa, in the end, is gonna be the woman Jeff wants her to be.

She’s going to be adventurous, she is going to be capable of action,

she's going to be quite heroic, but she's gonna do it fashionably,

dressed to the nines in haute couture and lovely pumps.

There ’s a joke going through the film that Lisa can be what Jeff wants

and she can be it according to her own style, elegantly.

Deliberately repulsive? I'm just trying to make it sound good.

You just have to face it, Lisa, you're not meant for that kind of a life.

Few people are.

-You're too stubborn to argue with. -I'm not stubborn. I'm just truthful.

I know, a lesser man would have told me it was one long holiday,

and Iwould have been awakened to a rude disillusionment.

Oh, well now, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

lfyou want to get vicious on this thing, I'd be very happy to accommodate you.

This scene represents the nadir in their relationship.

I mean, it doesn’t get much lower than this.

It’s dark. It's the darkest scene they share.

He's telling her that she can’t come with him, and he won 't stay with her.

He's telling her, effectively, that she can’t be part of his life.

He's cutting her out of his life.

Right now it doesn't seem so.

And this is gonna be another example of how the mood will carry across the courtyard.

Jeff is going to tell Lisa,

he’s telling Lisa, more or less, that they have no future,

and we’re going to, as soon as she leaves, go through the window

to the Thorwalds' apartment, where Mrs. Thorwald is going to be killed.

So the same night that Jeff gets rid of Lisa to a certain degree,

Thonlvald’s gonna get rid of his wife.

And this is how people have often seen Thorvvald as a kind of a doppelgénger,

a dark double of Jeff.

They have a lot in common. They're both middle-aged men, they travel,

they don ’t want to settle down,

and they both would like the woman in their life out of the way.

-Goodbye, Jeff. -You mean good night.

I mean what I said.

And we’re gonna see...

In a moment, we’re gonna hear, actually, the murder sequence.

And it’s a good one, because it’s classic Hitchcock.

It’s done quietly. It’s registered only in sound and silence.

It's off screen completely.

'Cause Hitchcock had a sense that sounds were more terrifying to people.

They're more nebulous and ephemeral, harder to get a hold of,

and they scare us more.

But also, he’s one of many directors who think that

sounds just actually register more deeply in the human consciousness than images do,

which rather bounce off our eyes, whereas sounds penetrate.

Here comes the murder.

Registered in two sounds, a scream and broken glass.

And the mood, again, of Jeff and Lisa's fight,

wafting out like a dark cloud into the courtyard,

past the Thonxvalds’ window, we won ’t be looking at it when it happens.

Don't!

This is a big part of Hitchcock's art,

the maximum effect from the minimum gesture.

And now this long sequence,

where Jeff watches Lars remove his wife's body from the apartment.

One of many very morbid scenes in this film that really are left to our imagination.

We start outwith a little comic interlude.

The nice thing about all these windows is the variety of tones

Hitchcock can avail himself of.

He gets to be like a composer here,

just mixing a little humor here, a little melodrama there, a little suspense.

This is why this single set works so well,

’cause it has more variety than any of his other single sets had.

I like the fall this guy takes, it’s well done. Good slapstick.

Now, Jeff's smile is gonna fade.

As we go to the darker window, the Thorwalds.

And this is Thonivald, I’m sorry to say, carrying his wife's body out piece by piece.

The music is a comic, Iugubrious accompaniment.

It’s not the music most directors would choose for this scene.

Most directors would choose something a little more obvious in its dark undertone.

This has a comic quality,

a humorous quality that contrasts with the mood.

Here, we see Hitchcock always clear.

He learned from silent film to not underestimate

how clear you had to get your visual information across to your audience.

A clock as big as a movie screen.

Thorwald’s back.

But we’re not gonna be watching him do what he’s doing tonight,

so we're gonna have to go somewhere else.

We’re gonna go to the composer’s window.

The composer's having trouble with his music.

He ’3 frustrated, he's gotten drunk. This happens with composers.

And this is a good time to point out

that Hitchcock had an idea with this composer’s window.

He wanted the composer to be working on a song

while Hitchcock was working on the film.

It’s gonna take the film for this man to finish his song.

It’s gonna finally be recorded with a full band and on a record,

and he’s gonna be finished with it just when Hitchcock's finished with the film.

The film and the record will both be ready for distribution at the very end.

It’s a clever little idea that Hitchcock had.

And maybe why he put himself in the composer's window.

The two artists, the two guys working on their masterpiece.

Thorvvald off for his second trip

to the East River, where he's dumping his wife's body we find later.

Jeff’s jolted awake.

No Thorwald appears yet.

And so we're gonna have to go somewhere else for a little while.

Miss Torso, who's back from her night of "juggling wolves, " as Lisa said.

And this is further evidence that Lisa reads Miss Torso better than Jeff,

because she's keeping that wolf at bay.

We know, in the end, she is loyal to one man, Stanley, her soldier,

and that she really doesn’t love any of those men,

just as Lisa understood, because Lisa knows Miss Torso is like her.

Whenever Hitchcock diverts us like this,

it always makes the thing he wants to show us

come at us a little more like a surprise.

Now Thonxvald's back.

You get this funny contrast between Miss Torso in a private moment,

and Thorwald on the other side of the wall.

A little commentary on voyeurism,

how if we only knew what was going on a few feet away from us

in these apartment complexes.

And the film, in general, speaks to us visually

about the notion that we live very close to people

but very far away from them at the same time.

This is one of many moments in the film

where Hitchcock will let us see something that Jeff doesn’t,

even though we're always from his point of view or almost always.

And it’s an important piece of information.

We see him leaving his apartment with a woman.

We wonder, "Is this Mrs. Thorwald? Is Jeff wrong?”

Of course, we later find out it's his mistress, "the woman he killed for, " as Lisa says.

And this scene finishes with this lovely, quiet sound of raindrops falling

and this segue to this busy morning in this jazz sequence.

This is a very interesting bit of dialogue. Listen here for a second.

-What's that supposed to be, ma'am? -It's called "Hunger."

We check in with Miss Torso,

and we get our introduction to this little dog that this couple on the third floor have

and their ingenious pulley system.

This is not the counter-clockwise pan, this is a clockwise one.

It’s not like the others we ’ve seen, and it’s much more manic.

It's gonna pull back very rapidly into the apartment.

Everything about this morning sequence seems frenzied

and reflecting this overheated atmosphere.

-All it did was make the heat wet. -That's it. That's it.

Stella ’3 back,

and she’s giving Jeff a hard time for his voyeurism again.

In this sequence,

he starts to compare some of his thoughts in these windows to her.

He starts to share some of his theories with her,

and she becomes like Lisa will, a bit of an assistant sleuth.

This might be as good a time as any to talk about that statue

I had you reflect on there for a second.

It’s called Hunger, and I think it's worth mentioning

that Hitchcock often liked to mix sex and food.

It was one of the ways he got some of his dirty jokes

and innuendo past the censors.

For example, you may recall in Notorious

that Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman were locked in a passionate embrace,

and oddly enough, talking about the chicken dinner

they were gonna consume that night.

He likes to mingle the two, and so when we see a statue called Hunger,

it probably has to do more with the dinner that woman is expecting to have.

And there are a lot of starved, hungry women across the way,

emotionally starved, sexually starved.

There ’s the sculptress, there’s Miss Lonelyhearts.

Even comically, we’ll find

that the newlywed wife is sexually starved and not able to be satisfied.

Mrs. Thonrvald's certainly not happy in her marriage.

Even Miss Torso is waiting for her soldier boy to come back,

and in the meantime,

every scene we see Miss Torso in, she's eating.

She’s very hungry, too.

Nothing but hungry women over there.

A kind of a Heartbreak Hotel for lonely women.

All of them reflections of Lisa and her vulnerability

and her longing for love.

How about this morning? Any further developments?

The shades are all drawn in the apartment.

-In this heat? -Yeah.

Well, they're up now.

And now we get our first glimpse of Thorvvald the morning after the murder.

-Get back! -Where do you want me to go?

-Come on, get out of sight. -What's the matter?

Jeff doesn't wanna be seen peeping,

and we’re nervous for him, too, because we're peeping with him,

and Hitchcock knows that it’s a very uncomfortable feeling

to be caught looking at somebody.

He's gonna play on that fear later on.

Jeff's gonna be caught peeping and so are we.

That's the kind of look a man gives

when he's afraid somebody might be watching him.

This is the scene where Thorwald discovers that the dog is interested in the garden.

As we know, having seen the film,

Mrs. Thorwald’s head is buried in that garden.

I like this shot,

as Jeff slowly approaches the camera and then the camera tilts down slowly.

It’s a very dramatic introduction to this shot,

and it's dramatic because it’s a dramatic point.

Hitchcock is talking to us unconsciously.

We can’t know it’s there.

But the camera tells us it’s something very grave, and indeed it is.

It’s something horrible, a woman ’3 head buried in that garden.

That's the camera letting us know

there ’5 something horrible that we don 't understand.

And don't sleep in that chair again.

Great conversationalist.

Stella.

Now, Jeff's gonna ratchet up his voyeurism here in a second.

He's gonna start using his binoculars and then his telephoto lens.

So he’s becoming something of a professional voyeur.

Of course, he already is a professional voyeur.

His profession is that of a cameraman.

I often think of Jeff, at this moment,

changing from being a surrogate for the filmgoer

to a surrogate for the filmmaker,

because he’s using more professional equipment here.

This, by the way, lets us know

that the case that Thorwald was using

was the case in which he sells jewelry.

He's a traveling salesman who sells jewelry.

The binoculars and telephoto lens

allow Hitchcock to plausibly come in for closer detail,

and we get a lot of close detail here.

And notice Hitchcock is gonna be able to use this iris effect,

the dark circle around the image,

which is a little bit of a reference or homage to silent film traditions,

which often use that iris effect, and Hitchcock knew that.

He’s having fun recreating silent films here.

Jeff moves to the telephoto lens,

and we get something of a visual dirty joke here,

as he drops his telephoto lens in his lap.

It's often been commented on

and it’s certainly the kind of joke that Hitchcock would like.

I think it’s important to note that he had a very lascivious sense of humor.

I often tell my students

that with Hitchcock and Shakespeare, it’s the same thing.

If you think there ’3 a dirty joke, you're right.

And of course, most of his dirty jokes have a point.

Right, this is a man whose sexuality is all in his fantasy world,

so it makes sense that his camera has the large phallus.

You get this very famous shot from the film

because I think it’s an image of aggressive voyeurism,

with this massive telephoto lens aimed at its subject.

Here, we get to see a little detail that really convinces us that he’s a killer.

It just seems too likely at this point.

So, by going in close-up, we can see more.

In fact, when he goes to lie down in a minute, you’ll see a little bottle on a table,

which I have to think is some kind of liquid

that helped him in the process of breaking his wife's body down.

I like this detail of giving him a nap,

because Hitchcock makes his killers so human.

Hitchcock avoids clichés of evil with his bad guys.

They’re regular folk.

He really had a strong notion that it’s the regular folk,

people who take naps and garden, who do the hideous things.

He didn’t trust normality.

Here's our foun‘h counter-clockwise pan around the courtyard,

these little breaks we take along the same route.

We're stopping at the composer, who's attracted to his music.

Again, he can’t quite leave it. He's coming back to it.

He has this love-hate relationship with the piano.

We see this little family up here that we never stop and look at.

I always think it’s as if Jeff doesn’t really wanna look at a happy family,

’cause that would not confirm his notions of marriage,

which are very cynical.

You get this lovely arrangement of sounds,

a little pounding of piano, a little whistling, a dog bark.

It's a musique concrete in between.

It’s a rich soundtrack,

'cause you have all these apartments intermingling in their sounds.

That shot of Miss Torso in her bath

and that Hitchcock likes so much, our sculptress.

This is gonna be just like the last pan,

an introduction to Jeff and Lisa kissing.

Past the newlywed window, which makes perfect sense,

considering we’re gonna look at these two locked in an embrace.

And this is the scene

where Lisa has a hard time getting Jeff to pay attention to her,

even though she’s sitting in his lap.

Pay attention to me.

I'm not exactly on the other side of the room.

And I want to introduce here a visual pun that’s typical of Hitchcock.

By separating sounds and image like he does in this film,

you often hear one thing and see another,

he gives himself the chance to make some little jokes

and we have one coming up.

In a moment, Jeff's gonna look out the window

and we’re gonna see Miss Torso in bed

in a sexy little teddy negligee.

She’ll be eating as she always is.

That's what we'll see, but what we 7] hear is Jeff saying,

"That would be a horrible job to tackle. "

And it leaves us very confused.

It seems as if he's saying Miss Torso would be a difficult job to tackle.

A moment later, we'll figure out what he really meant.

And I ’II wait till we get there, now.

What's interesting about a butcher knife

and a small saw

wrapped in newspaper?

Nothing, thank heaven.

Why hasn't he been in his wife's bedroom all day?

I wouldn't dare answer that.

Lisa cannot get Jeff to concentrate on what she wants to concentrate on.

She’s reaching her point of frustration here.

-And I'm afraid it's with me. -What do you think?

Something too frightful to utter.

There, again, is one of those jokes,

those little comments that Lisa and Stella keep making.

"There’s something strange about you, Jeff. "

Here's the shot I was talking about, coming up.

That'd be a terrible job to tackle.

Just how would you start to cut up a human body?

Now we get it.

And now look how Hitchcock has posed the composer just over Lisa ’5 shoulder.

One of many times in which he wants

to stress the relationship between Lisa and that composer,

who, of course, is creating a song

that we find, in the end, is called Lisa.

Again, these windows across the way often make more sense

as reflections of Jeff and Lisa ’5 life and relationship than in reality.

Here, we get a little false hint here.

Looks like Thonxvald is dumping a body into a crate there,

but we know there's no longer a body there.

Sitting around looking out of the window to kill time is one thing,

but doing it the way you are, with binoculars and wild opinions

about every little thing you see, is diseased!

What, do you think I consider it recreation?

I don't know what you consider it,

but if you don't stop it, I'm getting out of here.

They're gonna chat for a while, so we can talk fashion again.

Lisa ’3 in her second dress,

and as we know, these were all dreams for Hitchcock, these outfits.

This one seems a little more intimate than the last.

The other one was for a night out in Manhattan at 21.

This is more for an indoor petting party like she had in mind.

It’s a little more seductive, a little more private.

It’s a lovely outfit.

If you’re looking for a correspondence across the way,

I would say it’s Miss Torso's outfit that I just showed you a short while ago.

It's in the same dark shades, black or dark blue,

and it, too, has transparent parts like these sleeves in Lisa ’3 outfit.

And of course, the mood matches, too, right?

We have Jeff and Lisa necking by the window

and we have Miss Torso in a sexy outfit in her bed.

So, again, there’s always this connection

between the mood in Jeff and Lisa's apartment

and the mood in the windows across the way.

...and trouble starts,

but very, very few of them end up in murder, if that's what you're thinking.

It's pretty hard for you to keep away from that word, isn't it?

-You could see all that he did, couldn't you? -Of course...

In a moment, Lisa ’3 gonna stumble into a joke

that we share with Jeff that she doesn’t understand.

Oh, Jeff, do you think a murderer would let you see all that?

That he wouldn't pull the shades down and hide behind them?

Just where he's being clever. He's being nonchalant about it.

And that's where you're not being clever.

A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window.

Why not?

Why, for all you know,

there's probably something a lot more sinister going on behind those windows.

Where?

No comment.

We get that joke. Lisa doesn't.

We know what's going on behind that window.

We don ’2‘ think of it as sinister, but maybe Jeff does,

because, of course, it is marriage, and we’re gonna see later on

that even though those newlyweds should be having a good time,

it doesn’t seem like the husband is.

So maybe there is something sinister going on behind that window.

Here, we get this lovely approach shot to Lisa

that emphasizes now she’s starting to believe what Jeff is thinking.

And it’s a shot that excites us in the audience.

We feel like things are starting to get more intense.

Lisa '5 gonna go out and do a little reconnaissance for Jeff here.

Again, think of Hitchcock, minimum gesture, maximum effect.

That's the visual equivalent of the murder of Mrs. Thorwald.

The smallest gesture, a match being lit, registers the presence of Thorwald.

Again, Hitchcock, one of his great skills, understatement.

Elegant understatement, and he'll use that cigar quite a bit.

Listen to what Lisa says here, and Jeff.

All right, but what’s he doing now?

He'sjust sitting in the living room in the dark.

Hasn't gone near the bedroom.

That line makes me laugh because it’s an accurate description of Jeff, too,

sitting there in the dark, hasn’t gone near the bedroom.

We know what Lisa ’3 plan was tonight and it didn’t work.

Another parallel between the two.

And then we sign off, just at the ember of a cigar as he draws in his breath.

Later on, we 7] see him registered only through smoke.

-lmpon‘ant, huh? -Well, it's probably nothing important at all.

It's just a little neighborhood murder, that's all.

This is a chatty scene. It might be a good time

to talk about this shield on the wall behind Jeff.

Students often ask me about its significance

’cause they learn that Hitchcock rarely features something visually

that he doesn't have an idea of it meaning something.

And I think he does with this shield,

though I'm often reluctant to tell them what I do think.

But there are critics out there who see it as a symbol of female sexuality.

If you look at it, just in terms of design and shape,

that seems like a plausible idea.

But you may find that the notion of Hitchcock

intending that kind of symbolism is preposterous.

I would emphasize a few things.

First of all, as I mentioned before,

Hitchcock had a famously Iascivious sense of humor,

also had a great taste for visual puns

and rarely let anything within the compass of his screen

that he didn’t intend to mean something.

80 taking all that into consideration, it doesn’t strike me as implausible

that in this film about a man

who was trying to decide whether or not to let a woman into his life,

he'd have this symbol perched above Jeff's shoulder.

Particularly when we take into account that Hitchcock often seems to tease Jeff

for his weak sexuality and his fear of women, then it becomes even more pointed.

Harry?

It’s kind of a dumb joke, but it’s a joke with some significance, right,

because Jeff's take on marriage is so negative

that it even seems that marriage ruins sex.

All these windows across the way, it’s hard to find a good view of marriage,

maybe that one older couple above,

but we don 't spend much time looking at them, either.

If these windows are reflections of Jeff’s consciousness,

well, there aren’t too many positive views of marriage.

Even in the first, supposedly blissful days of marriage,

it’s no fun, from Jeff’s point of view.

I could point out, by the way, right now maybe,

that this actor, you might be familiar with him, he's Raymond Burr.

He played Perry Mason famously on television.

But Hitchcock has an idea in this film

of dressing him like his old producer, David O. Selznick.

Hitchcock did not like Selznick. Selznick was an interfering producer

and Hitchcock was a very independent director.

So he exacted a small revenge

by making his murderer in this film a dead ringer for David O. Selznick,

even giving him some habits that Selznick had,

like cradling the phone between his neck and his shoulder

and walking around with it, like Selznick would do famously.

It’s a little small game that Hitchcock plays,

an example of how playful he is when he makes a movie

and how a great deal of fun in these films is just finding these little hidden jokes.

Now we have Lieutenant Doyle ’s first visit to Jeff’s apartment.

He ’3 played by Wendell Corey.

I like this angle here, this shot, looking down on Jeff.

Often, the shots inside the apartment echo those from outside.

Jeff’s always looking up or down.

So Hitchcock has a lot of low and high angles in the apartment, too,

to keep the shots consistent. This is a lovely shot here,

looking up in a diagonal going from Jeff to Doyle to that balcony back there,

where there '5 a little girl playing with her doll.

It's that happy family I mentioned earlier.

This is a lovely composition in depth, great recession,

and a lovely varied background, too, with the smoke and the vast array of lines.

You can tell, in a shot like this, you’re dealing with a director

who, early in his career, started with set design.

Hitchcock has a great sense of just setting up a scene like a lovely shop window.

This is a very short scene and it’s gonna pass very quickly.

We ’re gonna have one of those musical introductions of the next scene.

In a moment, you're gonna hear some music and that’s gonna tell us,

it so often happens in this film,

that we’re gonna be moving out to the courtyard in the next scene.

The courtyard calls to us through its sounds. Here it comes.

Yeah, so you told me.

Well, Jeff, I've got to run along.

I won't report this to the department. Let me poke into it a little on my own.

It's another carnival-like piece.

And it’s gonna serve as the backdrop

to Lars Thonivald discovering the dog digging in his garden.

And it's, again, this musical, rhythmic way Hitchcock has of filming,

of moving fluidly from one scene to another, overlapping, covering his seams.

I’d also note, watch as after Doyle leaves and we go back to Jeff,

Hitchcock will announce the transition through the dog’s bark.

There, a noise that tells us to go outside.

The noise, the sounds are used very pointedly in this film.

And this is a scene of quiet menace

because what’s most disturbing about Thorvvald here is how nice he is to the dog.

We’ve seen that he is not a particularly nice guy.

And it concerns Jeff that he’s so gentle to the dog.

It seems to imply something. Why would he be so kind to that dog?

And Jeff's wondering what’s buried in that garden.

Doyle will take a look around and then he’ll come back to Jeff's apartment

for a very lengthy discussion with Jeff.

He has a six months' lease.

Used up a little more than five and a half months of it.

He's quiet, drinks, but not to drunkenness.

Pays his bills promptly with money earned as a costume jewelry salesman.

Wholesale.

Kept to himself. None of his neighbors got close to him or his wife.

Yeah, well, I think they missed their chance with her.

This is a very lengthy dialogue between the two,

but it has a lot of good lines like that.

Jimmy Stewan‘ gets a chance to really show off

that folksy diction that we like so much.

Too bad.

Thorwalds were leaving their apartment at just that time.

We can hear Miss Torso's music coming in and we’re gonna see,

Hitchcock wants to make it clear,

that Doyle has something of an eye for the ladies.

Check out that leering grin.

-How's your wife? -Oh, she's fine.

Another great Stewart delivery.

Who said they left then?

-Who left where? -The Thorwalds, at 6:00 in the morning.

Now, there's something interesting on the wall back there.

You got a picture of two flyers or combat pilots

and that ties into the backstory here.

Jeff and Doyle both flew together in the war. They flew together,

and they supported each other, saved each other's lives, et cetera.

So that’s a little strengthening of that backstory.

But of course, there's also a reference to Jimmy Stewart in real life,

because in World War II, Jimmy Stewart was a flyer, a bomber,

a celebrated war veteran,

probably the highest ranking officer that Hollywood had,

probably the most celebrated war veteran, so that comes into play, too,

when we think about it, when we see that picture.

We might also think about the fact

that Hitchcock apparently based the story of Jeff and Lisa

on what he had heard of the relationship

between war photographer Robert Capa and Ingrid Bergman.

They were involved in a relationship

that ended up going nowhere because Capa didn't wanna get married.

Hitchcock found that hard to believe

because Ingrid Bergman was one of these actresses

that he had developed a profound crush on,

and so the notion of not wanting to get married to Ingrid Bergman

he found a little odd.

...or a paper, or something. What he doesn't know won't hurt him.

I can't do that, even if he isn't there.

Here ’3 a little funny thing coming up here that you could take a look at.

Doyle, while he’s talking,

is gonna unconsciously take in this piece of abstract art on the wall.

It’s gonna disconcert him a little. Watch.

All right. Make sure you don't get caught, that's all.

What? lfyou find something, you've got a murderer,

and they don't care anything about a couple of house rules.

If you don't find anything, the fellow's clear.

At the risk of sounding stuffy...

See? He seems a little confused by it.

This is like that moment where we looked at the sculptress' statue, Hunger.

Hitchcock thinks modern art is comical, and he has little moments

where regular people run into abstract modern an‘

and don ’t know quite what to do with it.

I should note that’s a Matisse-like piece,

something from the Fauve school of colorful Expressionism.

It’s actually the kind of an‘ Hitchcock liked himself and bought himself.

In one interview, he said his favorite painter was the Swiss Expressionist Paul Klee.

And in many ways, Hitchcock thought of himself as an Expressionist.

An Expressionist is somebody who values or prizes visual expressiveness

over plausibility or realism.

Hitchcock was often frustrated that people said

his shots or his scenes were implausible or fakey,

when his whole intention wasn't to be realistic

but to get across a feeling or an effect like an Expressionist would.

We'll see a couple of those shots at the end of the film

when Jeff falls and when he tries to keep Thorwald at bay with his camera.

These scenes, some people find them too fakey,

Hitchcock would call them Expressionist.

Hitchcock had no patience for people

who would fault him for problems with plausibility.

He used to say that plausibility was the easiest part, so why bother.

"Love, Anna."

Hitchcock’s gonna finish this scene, again, with a little bit of comedy,

the second time we finish with Jeff trying to satisfy a remote itch.

He either uses these itches or the honeymooners, something

to end his notes with a little bit of comedy. This one’s very nicely done, though,

because it’s, again, one of these dislocations of sounds and image.

We're gonna see one thing and hear another, but they’re gonna match in a humorous way.

The woman doing her opera scales provides the perfect background for Jeff.

Now Jeff has become so comfortable with his voyeurism

that it’s a form of entertainment for him now, he snacks as he watches the windows.

And many people see him as a primitive, early version

of the person in front of the TV with their remote control,

going from window to window, entertaining himself with different channels.

It's been commented on that these windows are almost like different genres.

Miss Lonelyhearts, with the melodrama, the Thorwalds are the suspense,

Miss Torso provides a little sex, and so forth.

Here we get our second pop video with Miss Lonelyhean‘s.

Somebody started a song. It’s called Waiting For My True Love to Appear,

at the very same time that Miss Lonelyhearts has decided to go out

and try to pick up a guy.

Hitchcock, in his interviews, said that he'd dressed her in green

so she would match Lisa, who will show up in green.

They’re different shades, but he wanted us to link them in our minds.

I would point out an even more explicit parallel.

Take a good look at Miss Lonelyhearts' bracelet.

It's a rather unusual chunky piece of jewelry

and Lisa ’5 gonna have one exactly like it.

Miss Lonelyhean‘s needs some drinks to screw up her courage

before she goes across and sees if she can find a fella.

While she's finding her way out of the building,

we stop in at the composer's place.

He's having a party tonight and we're gonna watch it develop step by step.

Hitchcock's very meticulous in the progress of this party.

Miss Torso is having some instruction in her apartment.

You can see how Hitchcock had so many frames available to him, didn't he?

These windows are such a visual aid.

And now, "Many dreams ago, ” begins the song lyrics,

and we see Miss Lonelyhean‘s,

the green dress helps us spot her very nicely, too.

It stretches plausibility that she find the only table in Manhattan that Jeff can see,

but the set is set up so ingeniously, we really don ’t question it very much.

And we ’re gonna have a really clever, smooth segue

to Thonivald here, in a second, without needing to edit.

And we pick up Thorwald and now the song lyrics become about him.

'Cause Hitchcock’s very clear

about what you’re hearing when you’re seeing certain things.

Hitchcock spotlights his dry-cleaning box here.

It's called Engle Hand Laundry. l have no idea what that means,

if he had any intention in giving us those words.

He usually does, but I don 't know what it means.

Now the song will comment ironically on Lars Thorwald when he comes in here.

The lyrics here are, ”You’re the one I dreamed of, many years ago. "

It becomes a sad commentary on the Thomxalds' marriage,

which is definitively over now.

Now I’ve emphasized that Hitchcock separates sound and image

so that he can create interesting counterpoints.

We see one thing, we hear another.

He can mash them in funny ways.

But separating sound and image serves other purposes, too.

It allows you to explore two terrains instead of one.

Hitchcock found it boring to simply show the same thing that you were hearing.

He liked to complicate the image, to stretch it out.

If you show one thing and see it and hear another,

you're exploring two terrains at once. You're getting a richer variety of information.

And you’re taxing your viewer a little more, too.

You're making them work a little harder, draw in more information.

Long distance again.

l have to introduce another one of these sexual interpretations.

Hitchcock was an amateur fan of psychotherapy and Freud,

and he was very conscious of the idea that dreams, in Freudian dream symbolism,

a purse referred to female genitalia.

And so you get a lot of handbags in Hitchcock.

Particularly in this film, but you’ll know in other films,

for example, in Psycho and Marnie, too,

handbags are emphasized, too.

Men are often trying to get into women’s handbags,

steal things from their handbags,

women are often keeping their most private things in their handbags.

There's somebody at the door.

-Hi. -Hello.

Now the composer's party is heating up. Guests are arriving.

You can see a good deal of booze there in the foreground.

And we’re gonna get Lisa's arrival pretty soon. We'll go back to Thonxvald,

he’ll take that handbag and stow it away in the bed.

Lisa will arrive in her third outfit.

Hitchcock sets up the shot so that she can appear in the background.

What'd you do to your hair?

-Oh, well, Ijust sort of... -Take a look at Thorwald.

He's getting ready to pull out for good. Look at him.

I like this little bit of dialogue they start out with,

this little comic screwball stuff that John Michael Hayes is so good at.

He's been laying out all his things on one of the beds.

Shirts, suits, coats, socks.

So we can see Lisa ’3 third outfit here and it’s green, as I mentioned,

a paler, a subtler shade of green than Miss Lonelyhean‘s’,

but then again, Miss Lonelyhean‘s is supposed to be

a brassier, louder, more working class version of Lisa,

more emotionally vulnerable.

Look at Lisa ’5 bracelet, so similar to Miss Lonelyhearts'.

Hard to believe two women would wear such similar bracelets in one evening.

One critic has said that this outfit reminds him of a lady detective.

And I think that’s a good reading of what Hitchcock intended here.

It’s not as sexy as the last outfit or as chic as the first one.

This is a little more cerebral and of course, it fits perfectly

’cause Lisa ’3 going to be something of an amateur sleuth in this scene,

an assistant to Jeff in his detecting.

Well, I guess it's safe to put on some lights now.

No, not yet!

And here's that scene I mentioned where she’s gonna run the catwalk

in exactly the same way she did when she was first introduced,

from lamp to lamp.

And, again, he’s gonna have her pause as though she were a model on a runway

or at some exhibition.

This taste Hitchcock has for running the same patterns,

keeping us grounded in the terrain.

That’s a very an‘ificial pose. He wants to show off her outfit.

I think this is Hitchcock just celebrating Grace Kelly's style,

and also teasingly referring to her as a model as much as an actress.

This suit is probably familiar to Hitchcock fans.

Hitchcock developed, late in his career,

a fetish for this pale green women ’s suit.

You’ll see it again in The Birds, for example,

only a little more buttoned down, a little more tight.

Hitchcock liked women in suits.

He talked about this a lot.

This was one of his favorite subjects in his interviews.

He liked women in formal clothing. He liked to imply their sexuality.

He felt that the less a woman wore sexual clothes,

the more you could infer it.

You’ll never find a Sophia Loren

dressed in some kind of peasant garb in a Hitchcock film.

It's a very cerebral, intellectual notion of beauty.

Edith Head said that Hitchcock

was trying to make Grace Kelly into some sort of Dresden doll,

something untouchable.

And that’s Hitchcock’s notion of sexuality.

He liked it to be implied, and it’s typical of him, isn’t it?

Everything is inferred in Hitchcock, implied, suggested.

He ’3 not interested in what’s there, he’s interested in what's not there.

What about the witnesses?

We'll agree they saw a woman,

but she was not Mrs. Thorwald.

-That is, not yet. -Is that so?

This is just a nice, tiny little shot as Lisa falls into Jeff's lap.

She spins to the right while the camera approaches.

It's two movements in one.

It's that dance between the camera and the actor, both moving,

that quiet choreography between two dancers

that provides a certain elegant touch to Hitchcock cinema.

We have all night.

-We have all what? -Night.

And if you just see how nicely matched these earrings are with this outfit,

you just have to laugh at how much care Hitchcock put into these outfits.

And this is why, now, rarely a half year goes by

without a fashion magazine having some spread on the Hitchcock style.

I find it very comical that this man

has become posthumously a famous fashion designer,

this guy from a working class background in London.

You said I'll have to live out of one suitcase.

-I'II bet yours isn't this small. -This is a suitcase?

And this is what I mean about how Lisa ’3 gonna turn Jeff's words on him.

He said, "I’m gonna need a woman who can live out of one suitcase. "

She says, "Okay, Ican do that. "

But of course, she's doing it according to her own style.

She’s gonna live out of a Mark Cross overnight handbag.

I'll go along with that.

The composer's theme, which as we know is really Lisa ’5 theme,

comes through the window, and Lisa's gonna be drawn to it.

Watch her approach the camera, watch her approach the window.

It’s exactly what she'll be doing later in the Thorwalds' apartment.

And she'll comment on it, as she does several times.

Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that?

Well, he gets it from the landlady once a month.

It's utterly beautiful.

Jeff makes as much fun of that music as Lisa exalts in it.

It may be another reason Hitchcock put himself in the composer’s apartment,

not just because he and the composer are fellow artists,

but that’s the window that is the source of emotion, the source of love,

that’s where Lisa ’3 theme comes from.

That’s, in many ways, the central window of the film.

That’s where the emotions are centered.

I like this pose Lisa has here.

This feline pose there.

It's just one of many in which she makes herself

supremely comfortable in Jeff’s apartment.

She reminds me sometimes of a cat

who has wandered in and decided that she's gonna make this her home

whether anybody wants her to or not. She physically takes over,

despite Jeff's best efforts at keeping her at bay.

One of many ways in which Hitchcock suggests she has the upper hand.

I mean, like the kitchen and make us some coffee.

Oh, and some brandy, too, huh?

Return to the newlyweds.

Harry.

Again, a second time with that joke.

And, again, that relentlessly negative attitude towards marriage.

-J eff.

For the second time, we see Lisa as a shadow just as in her kiss,

again suggesting there's something dreamlike, ephemeral about Lisa.

Doyle, with his somewhat lascivious attitude, is very interested in that handbag.

Right now, Doyle seems to be interested in Jeff's theories, to take him seriously.

He's gonna get a phone call in a minute, though, that’s gonna...

Here, take a look at the composer. That party is really going now.

They’re gonna be totally drunk here in a minute.

He's gonna get a phone call in a minute

that proves to him that Jeff's theories are wrong, though.

What else have you got on this man Thorwald?

Well, enough to scare me you wouldn't show up in time and we'd lose him.

Think he's getting out of here?

Look, he's got everything he owns...

I like this scene here where he meets Lisa. It has some charming details.

Again, Doyle’s eye for the ladies.

I'm just warming some brandy. Mr. Doyle, I presume?

-Tom, this is Miss Lisa Fremont. -How do you do?

We think Thorwald's guilty.

That line always gets a chuckle from the audience,

and it reminds us that Grace Kelly was beautiful,

she was elegant, she wore clothes beautifully,

but I think, in the end, she’s particularly successful

because she has a great, deft comic sensibility.

In fact, if I were to compare her to one actress,

it would probably be Carole Lombard, Who is the only one I can think of

who could unite the kind of glamour they had

with a really good sense of comic timing.

It’s a really rare package to get, a really rare combo.

Now that call has convinced Doyle that Mrs. Thorwald is still alive,

so he no longer believes these theories.

From this point on, he treats everything they say very facetiously.

Mr. Doyle, that can only lead to one conclusion.

Namely?

That it was not Mrs. Thorwald that left with him yesterday morning.

You figured that out, eh?

Well, it's simply that women don't leave theirjewelry behind

when they go on a trip.

Come on, come on, Tom.

Now you don't really need any of this information, do you?

Here's an interesting shot.

Doyle's gonna walk back to the back of the room

and he’s gonna approach the camera to a very dramatic close-up shot.

The soundtrack is gonna dramatize it, too. Listen.

Lars Thorwald is no more a murderer than I am.

Doyle walks into a close-up, and he walks into a silence

introduced by that piano music.

So Hitchcock really wanted to underline that comment.

And I think it’s because even though Doyle is wrong about the murder,

he's probably right about the fact that

these two shouldn’t be prying so much in other people's business.

And I think Hitchcock wanted to underline his conviction here,

that this is nasty business, poking into people ’3 private lives,

especially when we don ’2‘ want people poking into ours.

And in fact, he’s so convincing in this scene,

he's gonna convince Lisa and Jeff to drop their enquiry for a while.

Well, your logic is backward.

You can't ignore the wife disappearing and the trunk and the jewelry.

I checked the railroad station. He bought a ticket.

Now, there’s not a lot going on in this very lengthy sequence of conversation,

but even here, you can see the hand of a good craftsman.

Hitchcock keeps moving these people around the room, elegantly,

quite often in groups of three.

In a minute, Jeff will approach them and we 7] get our first group of three.

And I just wanna show you how it falls apart,

and then comes together and falls apart again.

Here is one group of three.

We ’re shooting from a little below so that Jeff's low spot isn’t too obvious.

In a second, this group of three will break, and it’ll reform, break and reform again.

Mrs. Thorwald's clothes.

Clean, well packed. Not stylish, but presentable.

He breaks.

Doyle breaks the threesome, sits down and creates a new one,

just for a moment, right there.

Jeff moves over here

and creates a spot that Lisa can fill to make a new threesome.

I would say it looked as if she wasn't coming back.

Now, this kind of elegant movement isn ’t particular just to Hitchcock.

This is the hand of the studio craftsman,

who felt that even the smallest shot should have a nice sense of balance.

If people sometimes wonder why do we make such a big deal of these old films,

pan‘ of it is this professionalism on the smallest level, this sense that

even your most unimportant moment should have a nice composition to it.

This is a good shot, too.

Again, one of these angles that either go up or down within the apartment.

Poor Doyle is squished against the camera here.

It's a very unflattering and uncomfortable angle,

but that's, of course, what Hitchcock wanted.

He ’3 joking, but he’s supremely uncomfortable.

And Lisa ’5 got the superior angle here, because she's quite angry with him.

Doyle's attraction to Lisa adds to her power, I think.

Yeah, I guess you're right.

Okay, and we have another one of our musical introductions.

The party is getting drunken,

and they've decided to sing Mona Lisa, the great Nat King Cole song.

We should probably note, that song seems appropriate.

The other song that comes out of the composer's window is Lisa.

So, again, we're in that same situation.

One scene is winding down visually, another scene is beginning orally.

The courtyard is calling us out into the next scene.

We're really dealing with two sequences at the same time right now.

They’re overlapping.

Oh, that telephone call. I gave them your number.

-I hope you don't mind. -Depends on who they were.

I want you to take a look at the composer in this image, too. It goes by so fast.

E verybody's very boozy and drunk and having a great time,

but not the composer.

You're gonna see him sipping a cup of coffee.

Apparently, he's already drunk too much.

[often wonder, though,

does this song make him melancholic in some way?

There, look at him.

Did he have a Lisa once?

Jeff, of course, goes to Miss Torso.

Lisa will call his attention to Miss Lonelyhearts.

And we get the second half of this story.

Again, always Miss Lonelyhean‘s gets the musical background,

as though it’s a pop video.

This is gonna play out to Mona Lisa.

She’s brought her dream lover home, but he’s hardly a dream lover, is he?

We can see him chomping gum. He's a cad.

But look how she's doing what she wanted to do in her last fantasy,

when they played To See You Is to Love You.

She wanted a man she could share a drink with.

So her dream has come true.

Except it’s not really a dream, it's reality, and it’s not nearly as nice.

I love this reaction shot.

Jeff’s very uncomfortable, but look at how riveted Lisa is.

She is mesmerized by Miss Lonelyhean‘s' situation.

She feels it so deeply.

The words here are, "Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep.

”They just lie there. They just die there. "

A little ironic commentary on how this dream hasn’t been realized.

And of course, it’s this wonderful counterpoint.

We’re seeing something tragic, sad, pitiful, personal.

But what are we hearing?

A bunch of people having a good time at a party.

This is Hitchcock. This is why sometimes people refer to him as a "poet of alienation, ”

'oause he’s very good at showing people in moments of private tragedy,

and at the same time keeping an eye on a world that doesn’t care at all.

And that’s what he does through the music.

We hear the world going on while somebody else is suffering awfully.

You know, much as I hate to give Thomas J. Doyle too much credit,

he might have gotten a hold of something when he said

that was pretty private stuff going on out there.

Now, we're at that scene where Jeff and Lisa

are starting to question whether they should be doing what they’re doing.

Two things have bothered them.

First, Doyle's words that maybe

they really shouldn't be prying into people ’3 private lives.

And secondly, witnessing that pitiful spectacle of Miss Lonelyhearts.

And so they have this discussion, what Lisa refers to as "rear window ethics. "

Jeff, you know, if someone came in here, they wouldn't believe what they'd see.

-What? -You and me with long faces.

Plunged into despair because we find out a man didn't kill his wife.

Lisa’s gonna say and do a couple of interesting things here.

First of all, she's gonna close the windows.

As she does it, she’s gonna use a metaphor out of the theater.

She’s gonna say, "Show’s over. "

Another example of Hitchcock drawing a parallel

between Jeff's curtains and the curtains of a movie theater.

She’s also gonna talk about going over across the way

and becoming one of the little people. Let’s listen.

Not if I have to move into an apartment across the way

and do the Dance of the Seven Veils every hour.

Show's over for tonight.

Preview of coming attractions.

It's ironic what Lisa says,

because she will go over there and she will only get Jeff's attention

when she does go over there.

She won’t dance the Dance of the Seven Veils.

But it’s not until she becomes one of Jeff's little fantasy people across the way

that he seems to really realize how much he wants her and needs her.

Here comes Lisa and this is that nightgown I ’ve referred to a couple of times,

the same one Mrs. Thonxvald wore, minus that little robe.

And this is typical Hitchcock.

Here he is, giving his movie star in a sexy nightgown,

but we’re thinking, "Oh, yeah. That’s the nightgown of a dead woman. "

-Yes, I like it. -Well...

Nice framing here, the curtains open right to our principal person in the next scene.

A good segue, again, smooth.

Now, this is an interesting sequence, because it’s within this sequence

that Hitchcock actually goes outside into the courtyard.

We realize now how much we ’ve seen from the point of view of Jeff’s window.

All the shots have been from the point of view of Jeff’s window.

This one has a few shots that are not,

presumably because this is the one scene where the whole neighborhood is together,

and that seems to free Hitchcock’s camera.

You’re gonna see a shot of the fire escape with three women arrayed on it,

like this, right there.

Nicely arranged shot, but shot from the ground,

not from Jeff’s apartment.

And we ’re gonna get close-ups of Miss Torso

and Miss Lonelyhean‘s, with Lisa sandwiched in between.

Two of these shots, again, not from the perspective of Jeff's window.

So Hitchcock’s camera frees up here ’cause everybody’s together now,

and I don ’2‘ think he feels like he has to stay behind Jeff's window.

There is the close-up of Miss Torso.

And we'll move quickly to a close-up of Lisa.

And then, in a moment, a close-up of Miss Lonelyhearts

in a very artificial, silent film pose.

Almost as if the three are linked in their sadness for the fate of this poor dog.

And one of the many times Hitchcock draws a parallel

between Lisa and both these women,

all women waiting for their man.

And this sad moment now, everybody goes back into their apartment,

this one moment of human contact is over.

Everybody's sealed back up into their little rabbit hutch.

And this is an idea that’s been inscribed in all the visuals of this film,

that these people live in close proximity to each other,

but actually in great emotional distance from each other.

In the whole courtyard, only one person didn't come to the window.

Look.

Why would Thorwald want to kill a little dog?

Because it knew too much?

You think this is worth waiting all day to see?

So, Jeff's comment there lets us know that a day has passed.

Lisa’s wearing a new dress, too.

So we really don 't know what happened with that romantic tryst the night before,

not too much, considering Jeff’s state.

Well, why not? That's what we're all thinking.

Lisa is now in her fourth outfit, the last dress she'll wear in this film,

and it’s got a couple of interesting attributes.

First of all, it’s much more of a day dress,

a dress that would allow someone to move about.

It's not as sexy or formal as the other ones, and that’s significant.

It also has this gold floral pattern on it.

Both of these attributes are significant, because this is the sequence

in which Lisa ’5 going to become something of an action hero.

She's going to be climbing fences, digging in the garden,

ascending fire escapes, leaping into windows.

So she needs a dress that has some give to it, that can move.

Right, Hitchcock thought on this level.

”The floral pattern will go nicely in the garden.

"It'll go nicely against the brick wall, like flowers on a trellis. ”

Hitchcock really did think in this kind of detail about his outfits.

This would be that vision of gold that Edith Head referred to.

Now look again. Now take it down.

I think it's typical of Hitchcock that he introduces a new piece of evidence,

but he finds a visual means of doing it,

a means that makes the audience look even harder into the screen

to squint and figure out his point.

It’s not easy taking Jeff's point here, the image is so small.

So, where another director might’ve turned to dialogue to move the plot along,

Hitchcock finds a visual conceit.

It’s typical of this film. I’ve never seen a film...

I can’t think of a film where an audience spends so much time leaning fonivard,

squinting, searching the images, cocking their ear.

I’ve never seen a film that has so much quiet information, remote information.

It has very important lines that you can barely hear,

very important images that you can barely see.

Hitchcock makes his audience work, but, of course, we love it.

We like to be challenged. It’s an old dictum of the Hollywood studio.

Allan Dwan often said, the great silent film director,

that you have to make your audience work and they want to work,

that we'll be more absorbed if we have a task to do

rather than having everything poured down the funnel of our ear,

as in so many films that are talk dependent.

You'll go? You won't dig anything up and get your neck broken.

No, no, we've...

We're not gonna call Doyle until I can produce Mrs. Thorwald's body.

What we've got to do is find a way to get into that apartment.

He's packing.

Now, here comes the shot where

Jeff is going to write a note to Thonxvald to get him out of the apartment.

And Hitchcock has a very extreme shot here.

Most of the shots are fairly conventional.

Hitchcock doesn’t throw around wild shots.

He only does them when they're necessary. That was a big part of his art.

He shoots from above and comes down onto the piece of paper.

So he seems to want to signal this is an important moment in the film,

and I think it is.

They’re finally making contact with these people across the way

who’ve just been fantasy objects, right.

Now things are really gonna happen.

And we move from this approach shot to this bouncy music coming up,

and we get the feeling that we’re really off and running on the finale of the film.

Charming little gesture there by Grace Kelly, the kind that wins her over to the audience.

This scene, you just have to marvel at the timing, it’s just perfect.

I wonder if they had to do it many times, because watch how precise the timing is.

As she puts this note into the door,

it’ll be registered by Lars Thorwald’s movement.

There she puts it, he hears it.

And she slips away at the split second he comes around the corner.

We get this nice close-up, it’s very satisfying.

We want to see what it looks like when a killer is found out.

And now, again, another matter of timing, but on two levels.

And this reminds us of how Hitchcock paints on such a huge scale.

This is reminiscent of Buster Keaton ’s films, you know, his ingenious mouse traps.

He, too, would film on a huge level, ocean liners and large buildings.

This is a lovely mousetrap of a structure.

And the timing, just perfect, exquisite.

We get a little low but not long,

because the action really starts to ratchet up here.

Stella ’s gonna go have a drink, but she's gonna come back,

and she's gonna notice Miss Lonelyhean‘s committing suicide.

And from that point on, we really start to dance between three apartments,

the Thorwalds', the composer’s, and Miss Lonelyhearts'.

Mind ifl use that portable keyhole?

Stella has all these great phrases for Jeff's voyeurism, "the portable keyhole. "

-I wonder... -Wonder what?

Miss Lonelyheart's just laid out something

that looks like rhodium tri-eckonal capsules.

And, again, this iris effect is perfect for this scene, isn’t it?

This is a melodramatic scene.

Miss Lonelyhean‘s' is the closest to silent film,

an old-fashioned silent film, of the windows across the way.

They note the drugs. We note that she's got a Bible there.

Stella doesn't mention it.

Look at Jeff's reaction shot here.

This is Hitchcock making it clear that Lisa ’5 winning Jeff over.

She's starting to show him

that she can be this action girl that he wants.

Thonxvald rummaging around in his wife's handbag,

which is never a good thing in a Hitchcock film.

I like the way we lose him for a little bit there, a little bit of verisimilitude.

We shouldn't track him too perfectly, gets implausible.

There ’s an interesting thing coming up here.

We begin to establish a real role reversal here.

Lisa and Stella really start to warm to the task here,

so much that they almost start to forget about Jeff

and to act like he’s the one who's the least adventurous.

And it’s kind of comical. Listen to the dialogue here.

And the last thing she would leave behind would be a wedding ring.

Stella, do you ever leave yours at home?

The only way anybody could get that ring would be to chop off my finger.

Let's go down and find out what's buried in the garden.

Why not? I've always wanted to meet Mrs. Thorwald.

-What are you two talking about? -You got a shovel?

-A shovel? Of course I don't have a shovel. -There's probably one in the basement.

Jeff, ifyou're squeamish, just don't look.

And that's a great line, "lfyou're squeamish, just don 't look. "

We're reminded of that conversation at the beginning of the film

where Jeff was taunting Lisa and suggesting

he experiences things that she'd be far too squeamish for,

but as the film develops, we find it’s quite the reverse,

that Lisa has a taste for action and adventure,

that she’s got spunk he never realized

and in fact, she's gonna be the one taking all the risks,

embracing a life of danger.

Jeff's gonna acknowledge it here in a minute. Listen to what he says.

Thorwald... Thorwald...

Chelsea 27099.

27099.

We scared him once, maybe we can scare him again.

Well, I guess I'm using that word "we" a little freely.

-I mean, you're taking all the chances. -Shall we vote him in, Stella?

Unanimously.

So even Jeff is noticing. Things are changing.

He ’3 becoming more passive, they're becoming more active.

Hitchcock, by the way, just gave us a little information that these three don ’t get,

that Miss Lonelyhearts is continuing with her suicide.

It's a sad, cruel moment.

These three have forgotten all about her, engrossed in their own situation.

This woman could be going on and killing herself now, nobody cares,

but we ’re a little bothered by it in the audience.

This is a very spooky moment,

because we’re now making contact with the object of our peeping.

This breaks that wall between them.

We ’re gonna hear his voice and for the audience,

it’s almost as if they were stepping into a movie screen, right.

That wall’s being broken down.

Lars Thorwald, from this moment, is no longer just a fantasy object.

They've made contact with him.

Well, did you get it, ThonNald?

Who are you?

I'll give you a chance to find out.

Meet me in the bar at the Albert Hotel.

Do it right away.

I think this gnome in the background adds a spooky detail to this scene.

Jeff’s in the shadow with this gnome.

I don't know what you mean.

Come on. Quit stalling, Thonivald, or I'll hang up and call the police.

We’re coming on another one of these moments where

the contrast between what we’re seeing and what we’re hearing, I think, is great.

There's a lovely counterpoint between sound and image,

as Thorwald hangs up this phone.

This is a man who’s got to be terrified.

As he heads out for a frightening assignation,

we ’re hearing some kind of goofy hootenanny music, all right.

This is what I mean about Hitchcock as an artist of alienation.

Quite often his characters, in their moments of worst terror,

the world seems to almost be laughing at them.

A glimpse of Thorwald on the way out.

And now we'll see that pattern that we established before,

of the cat walking up the stairs.

Here, this is retracing the cat's steps.

I think that’s why he showed the cat earlier,

to introduce us to this part of the set so we’d know where we are.

He's very careful in defining his space,

something that's often lacking in contemporary films,

where you don ’2‘ really know where one shot leads to another and so forth.

Again, this is Lisa beginning her career,

her brief career as action girl,

but on her terms, in nice dresses and nice shoes.

And, again, as we contemplate them digging in the garden,

we think of this typical Hitchcock idea,

a beautiful garden of flowers hiding what?

The head of a murdered woman.

And this is classic Hitchcock.

He likes to take things that we ooh and aah about,

the things we think are quite pretty

and suggest that beneath them are awful hidden realities.

He was not somebody who trusted pleasant domestic exteriors.

In fact, the more pleasant the exterior,

the more he was sure somebody was hiding something.

The more they tried to make themselves pretty on the outside,

whether it was a building or a person,

the more he felt evil was implied.

You remember Shadow of a Doubt, which is really about

the realities hidden beneath a small town.

He has it. Good night.

Good night.

Notice the composer, he's developing a song.

He's gonna have his full band for the first time,

so that idea of Hitchcock, of developing the song, is happening.

He's moving to a full band.

Stella was wrong about Miss Lonelyheart.

Jeff says, ”Stella was wrong about Miss Lonelyhearts, ”

but he’s not looking closely enough.

She’s writing a suicide note.

He's checking to see if Thorwald will come back,

this whip pan to the empty hole in the ground,

’cause Thorwald has already dug up Mrs. Thorwald’s head

and put it in a hat box in his closet.

And now Lisa really embarks on her action career. Listen.

"Wake up now, " says a member of the band.

This is one of those pointed sounds that Hitchcock uses to start off an action.

And Lisa's off.

I love this soundtrack here because it’s Lisa ’3 song.

It’s the composer's song, but it’s coming in snippets and snatches.

As the members of the band warm up,

it’s almost like the song is deconstructed.

It's almost like an abstract, modernist version of the song.

In this way, composer Franz Waxman and Hitchcock

were able to come up with

the kind of soundtrack you wouldn't normally get in a commercial film.

She goes right for Mrs. Thorwald’s purse.

We 7] find that Lisa has a maroon purse, too.

It's not alligator skin, but it’s similar shape, similar color.

Stella, too, has a maroon purse.

Hitchcock is so careful with his colors.

Mrs. Thorwald’s purse is empty,

and so will Lisa’s be, when they try to find a little money for bail later.

She said ring Thorwald's phone the second you see him come back.

Now this movement between the three apartments really starts to escalate.

The composer and his band are gonna stan‘ their finished version of the song,

just as Stella and Jeff

rediscover Miss Lonelyhean‘s in the midst of her suicide.

She’s just placed her note on the table.

She’s gonna put the pills in her hand and we’re gonna get a glimpse

of the composer playing his song with a full band now.

He's close to the end of arriving at his song.

There it is.

And of course, that music is gonna save Miss Lonelyhearts.

It’s gonna draw her to the window

but it’s gonna draw Lisa, too, the other Miss Lonelyhean‘s,

in this lovely shot that’s coming up.

Two Miss Lonelyhean‘s.

And as we reflect on that, Hitchcock slides in Thorwald from the side.

Another one of these clever segues.

Lisa!

And there ’3 a very nice effect here, as Hitchcock registers Thonivald's arrival

through the reflection in this window near the center of the screen.

Now, there ’3 a couple of ironies operating here.

Lisa said she'd get Jeff's attention if she had to go over there.

She's gone over there and she’s gotten Jeff's attention.

She's become one of his little fantasy people, right.

There's also the irony that Jeff is getting what he wanted,

and that you have to be careful what you wish for,

because he wanted to get rid of Lisa, and now it looks like it may happen.

And it looks like she may be throttled by the hands of his doppelgénger,

the other traveling guy who doesn’t want to settle down,

who wants to get rid of a woman in his life.

The door was open.

And, again, another lovely contrast in sound and image

because you have this vibrato harmonica.

It's just a gentle version of Lisa ’5 song.

But we’re looking at something suspenseful, frightening,

pretty soon violent.

And I think that’s Hitchcock avoiding the cliche’ of evil,

avoiding the obvious background,

finding tension, contrast, counterpoint as opposed to repetition.

Jeff! Jeff!

Jeff and Stella are like the audience here now.

They can’t do anything, they can’t leave, they can 't stop watching.

In fact, as an audience, we're looking in the mirror now, aren’t we?

We're looking at the same experience we're having.

Look at that. That's what an audience member would do.

And of course, the scene winds down as the music does.

It’s our, what, fourth or fifth pop video.

As the violent encounter between Thorwald and Lisa finishes,

so does Lisa ’3 theme from the composer’s room.

And we’re moving on now.

I like this close-up of Lars Thorwald.

He looks like a little boy who's been caught with his hands in the cookie jar.

Again, this vulnerable criminal Hitchcock comes up with.

And we're coming on to that very spooky scene.

It has quite an effect on audiences.

The sound they make when they watch it is quite unique,

because they’re not just scared, they’re spooked.

Thorwald’s gonna follow the trajectory of Lisa ’3 ring

to Jeff’s window and to us, and that’s why the audience is so horrified

because a person in the movie is gonna look them right in the eyes.

It's a very creepy feeling.

When we go to the movie theater,

we wanna sit in the dark and have our pleasure,

and we don’t want anybody acknowledging our peeping.

In Hitchcock's film, the people will sometimes look right at you.

The newlywed wife did it earlier in the film, though not nearly as frighteningly.

And I’d also note that little moment

where Lisa wags her finger with the wedding ring at Jeff.

Of course, she’s introduced a piece of evidence.

She’s saying, "Look, [have evidence. "

But the way she moves her finger, it has a funny irony, too.

It's almost as if she's saying, "Any ideas? Would you like to get married?” for example.

These are the fruits of Hitchcock's great sense of unity.

He ’3 made his principal piece of evidence also a reflection of his principal theme,

whether Jeff and Lisa should get married.

Notice that Lisa ’3 purse is maroon-like,

Mrs. Thorwald’s also.

Here, again, is one of those moments where Hitchcock does let us see something.

So now we know Thorwald’s coming, but he doesn't.

Now that’s just old-fashioned dramatic irony,

Sophocles did this,

where the author lets us know something that the characters don ’t.

It puts us in a situation

where we want to scream at the screen and tell the characters what's happening.

It’s uncomfortable to know more than they do.

Hitchcock, over and over in his interviews,

emphasized that he was interested in suspense, not mystery.

Mystery is plot-oriented.

In mystery, you hold back plot information from the audience.

ln suspense, you give them more information than they want.

He often said the more you tell your audience, in terms of plot,

the more it’ll pay back with interest.

Of course, visually, he holds back a lot,

but plots, there's something he makes the audience think about ahead of time.

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.

Like an old ham bone?

Now, we're coming on another, I think, really classic Hitchcock moment,

and that is Lars Thorwald’s arrival at Jeff's apartment building.

If you remember the murder of Mrs. Thorwald,

it was registered in only two sounds,

and Lars Thonxvald’s frightening arrival in Jeff's apartment

is gonna be registered, at first, almost only through sounds.

He called his wife long distance on the day she left,

after she arrived in Merritsville,

why did she write a card to him saying that she'd arrived in Merritsville?

Why did she do that?

-Where’d they take Lisa? -Precinct 6.

-I sent somebody over with the bail money. -Maybe you won’t need it.

-I'll run it down, Jeff. -All right. All right. Now hurry up, will you?

This fellow knows he's being watched.

Listen to the long silence Hitchcock allows

before we hear the click on the phone

that tells Jeff that he’s made a mistake and that Thorwald is coming to get him.

Hello. Hello. Tom, lthink Thorwald's left. I don't see...

Hello...

He wants to have a long silence

so you really hear that click with distinction, with resonance.

And, again, this notion that sounds are harder to control.

Sounds enter our consciousness a little deeper than images do.

We'll come up to the second sound soon.

A close-up of Jeff

and the slam of a door that sounds very industrial.

Soon to be followed by a third sound,

the heavy trudge of Thonzvald's steps on the staircase.

This lovely spiral turn, as Jeff awakens to the reality,

and Hitchcock's quiet approach to suspense.

He quiets things down, slows things down during moments of suspense.

Other directors do the reverse. They make things louder, wilder.

Here are the steps.

The steps are almost ridiculously amplified.

Any murderer coming to take care of somebody

would probably not allow themselves

to make such heavy sounds with their steps, right.

But at this point, Hitchcock's sacrificing plausibility for effect.

It's almost like the blows of fate approaching Jeff.

Now Thonxvald will appear in images.

Jeff readies himself with his flashes,

and we'll talk about this unique form of defense here in a moment.

Thorwald will appear in a lovely image,

a slice of vertical light that comes through the darkness.

And then his immense head,

because he’s so much huger than he's ever been in this film now.

And critics have often talked about how he almost seems like

the more vulnerable one at the beginning of this scene.

Jeff seems almost like the more taunting,

dark spirited one, sitting there in the shadows.

Again, as Hitchcock gives his killer this Willy Loman quality,

this sad sack quality.

Your friend, the girl, could have turned me in.

Why didn't she?

Now, we’re coming on this scene

where Jeff is gonna defend himself with flashbulbs.

Now, quite often this annoys newcomers to the film.

They find it fake, implausible.

And this is one of those moments where Hitchcock, I ’m sure, would answer,

”Well, it’s an Expressionist scene. ”

He wants to get across the subjective experience of being blinded.

And it allows him to introduce these great swaths of orange, right.

This is the way Hitchcock thought in terms of visual effects

and a nifty feeling he's getting across.

He doesn't care about reality here.

But there's another reason, too. It’s his sense of unity.

Hitchcock asked himself, ”How would a photographer defend himself?"

Well, with a camera. "How?" With its flashes.

It’s his way of using the objects at hand.

And it even has some metaphorical import, right.

Jeff has tried to keep the world at bay through his camera, right.

And he's trying to now, still, but it’s not working.

Reality is approaching.

He’s not gonna be able to live through his camera any longer.

Lisa! Doyle!

And this fight that comes across

in a very harsh montage, kind of Eisensteinian images.

But then it leads up to another shot

that, again, can’t be judged on its realism.

The fall. Jeff's fall from the window.

If you judge it on how realistic it is, it fails.

If you judge it on getting across the vertiginous horror of a fall,

the dream or nightmare of a fall, then it’s very successful.

And Hitchcock filmed a lot of these falls

and he used some of his most expressive visual images for these falls.

Jeff's gonna be superimposed on a background.

It won ’t be realistic, but it’ll get the effect,

the horrible effect of falling down, much better than realism will.

Here it comes.

Creele! Give me your .38!

I'm sorry, Jeff. I got here as fast as I could!

And the wind down to the scene.

Oh, Lisa, sweetie, if anything had happened to you...

Oh, shut up. I'm all right.

Gee, I'm proud of you!

You got enough for a search warrant now?

Oh, yeah, sure.

I like this shot coming up.

It’s another one of these rich composition in depth, a diagonal angle

going far in the background, from point to point, all the way back.

Stella, here, wants to find out about what's buried in the garden.

Here's how we find out.

Did he say what was buried in the flower bed?

Yeah. He said the dog got too inquisitive, so he dug it up.

It's in a hat box over in his apartment.

Only one thing fits in a hat box.

No, thanks. I don't want any part of it.

She finishes with an unconscious pun.

And our coda to the film.

Again, the counter-clockwise pan, the last one.

And all these resolutions, the composer and Miss Lonelyhearts are together.

His record has been completed.

The film is over, and he’s arrived at his record as well.

Both are ready for the market.

Here's where we hear the words of the song for the first time, ”Lisa. "

The Thomalds are gone.

The older couple above have a new dog.

All these endings, it makes for such a great ending

because there are so many endings.

And here’s where we find that Lisa was right,

Miss Torso is loyal to one man, Stanley, this nebbishy soldier.

And remember how he likes to mix sex and food

because the first thing they do is go for the fridge. Listen.

The Army's made me hungry. What've you got in the icebox to eat?

"The Army's made me hungry. What do you have in the icebox to eat?"

Nothing much has changed for the sculptress.

But the honeymooners...

...but if you'd told me you'd quit yourjob, we wouldn't have gotten married.

I think they may be the new Thorwalds.

Jeff, who was looking for more freedom,

is doubly grounded.

Is this a victory for Lisa?

He seems happy about it.

Lisa has her final outfit, quite different than anything she’s worn.

She seems to have transitioned to Jeff's world.

The book would suggest that, too.

Except we've seen throughout this whole film

that Lisa operates on her own terms.

She seems to still be calling the shots,

except our final note of ambiguity,

no wedding ring on her finger.

And the curtains come down,

reminding us that a window can be a heck of a lot like a movie screen.