REAR WINDOW - Trivia and Other Fun Stuff

The movie premiered in August 1954 at New York's Rivoli Theater as a benefit for the American-Korean Foundation, a postwar relief fund. By May 1956 the film had grossed more than $10 million.

Ad campaigns for the film's re-release featured Hitchcock saying: "Rear Window is such a frightening picture that one should never see it unless accompanied by an audience."

Alfred Hitchcock makes his traditional director cameo winding a clock in the composer's apartment.

Cinematographer Robert Burks had a long and successful beginning in the mid-1940s and cut short by his death in a house fire in 1968 at the age of 58. He was the director of photography on a number of well-known pictures, including King Vidor's The Fountainhead (1949), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), starring James Stewart, and The Music Man (1962). But it was his work for Hitchcock for which he'll always be best known. Beginning with Strangers on a Train (1951), he shot every Hitchcock film through Marnie (1964) except Psycho (1960) - 12 movies in all. He was Oscar®-nominated for Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, and one non-Hitchcock movie, A Patch of Blue (1965). He won for his gorgeous color photography of the Riviera in To Catch a Thief (1955).

Hitchcock and costume designer Edith Head first worked together on Notorious (1946). After Hitchcock contracted with Head's home studio, Paramount, in the 1950s, she designed the clothing for 10 more of his pictures, beginning with this one and extending through his last, Family Plot (1976). She received an Oscar® nomination for To Catch a Thief (1955). Her 34 nominations and eight awards make her both the most-honored costume designer and most-honored woman in Academy Award history to date.

When Hitchcock found good collaborators, he liked to continue working with them. Beginning with Rear Window, editor George Tomasini made nine films with the director, through Marnie (1964). He was nominated by the Academy for North by Northwest (1959).

In spite of his attachment to those with whom he worked most successfully, Hitchcock could also be petty, according to biographer Donald Spoto, especially in the case of screenwriter John Michael Hayes, with whom he did three more pictures after this. Hayes claimed Hitchcock told him he would get a bonus for Rear Window since his salary was so low but that they would have to wait and see if it worked on film first, then see if the critics liked it, then audiences. The director kept putting off the bonus until, during a disagreement over the script for To Catch a Thief (1955), he threatened not to release it. Hayes asked him to please stop mentioning the alleged bonus. Hitchcock never mentioned it again, and Hayes never received it. And when Hayes showed Hitchcock his Edgar Allan Poe Award for writing the screenplay, the director shoved the ceramic statuette back across the table to him dismissively, saying, "You know, they make toilet bowls from the same material."

James Stewart was supposed to have worked with Grace Kelly again in the MGM comedy Designing Woman (1957), but she dropped out of that project to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco. The movie was eventually made with Lauren Bacall and Gregory Peck.

In the story, Lisa (Grace Kelly) casually drops the name of producer/agent Leland Hayward into a conversation. Hayward owned the film rights to the story before Hitchcock and was set as the original producer.

The composer who struggles throughout the film with the theme song, "Lisa," was played by Ross Bagdasarian, prolific songwriter and, under the pseudonym David Seville, the creator of the novelty "band" The Chipmunks. Bagdasarian was the cousin of author William Saroyan, with whom he collaborated on Rosemary Clooney's hit song "Come On-a My House."

One of the guests at the composer's party is played by Kathryn Grant (here credited under her real name, Kathryn Grandstaff), who later married Bing Crosby. The movie features a background recording of Crosby singing "To See You (Is to Love You)" from Road to Bali (1952).

Thorwald's apartment, according to the script, is at 125 West Ninth St. West Ninth actually ends at Sixth Ave. (aka Avenue of the Americas) and is known as Christopher St. after that point. The building that inspired the exact design of Thorwald's building on the set is at 125 Christopher St. That means Jeff's building across the courtyard is situated on Tenth St. near Hudson, which explains why the police arrive so quickly; the Sixth Precinct is located on Tenth directly across from the building where Jeff's is meant to be.

MEMORABLE QUOTES

JEFF (James Stewart): If you don't pull me out of this swamp of boredom, I'm gonna do something drastic.
GUNDERSON (Uncredited): Like what?
JEFF: Like what, I'm gonna get married, then I'll never be able to go anywhere.
GUNDERSON: It's about time you got married, before you turn into a lonesome and bitter old man.
JEFF: Yeah, can you just see me, rushing home to a hot apartment to listen to the automatic laundry and electric dishwasher and the garbage dispose-all and the nagging wife?

STELLA (Thelma Ritter): 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.

STELLA: When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country's ready to let go.

JEFF: I need a woman who's ready to go anywhere, do anything, and love it.

STELLA: 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.

LISA (Grace Kelly): How's your leg?
JEFF: Hurts a little.
LISA: Your stomach?
JEFF: Empty as a football.
LISA: Anything else bothering you?
JEFF: Yes, who are you?
LISA: Reading from top to bottom: Lisa, Carol, Fremont.

JEFF: That's no ordinary look. That's the kind of look a man gives when he thinks somebody may be watching him.

LISA: Let's start from the beginning again, Jeff. Tell me everything you saw, and what you think it means.

LISA: You're not up on your private eye literature. When they're in trouble, it's always their Girl Friday who gets them out of it.
JEFF: Is she the girl who saves him from the clutches of the seductive showgirls and the over-passionate daughters of the rich?
LISA: The same.
JEFF: That's the one, huh? Funny, he never ends up marrying her, does he? That's strange.
LISA: Weird.

DOYLE (Wendell Corey): That's a secret, private world you're looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn't possibly explain in public.
LISA: Like disposing of their wives.

JEFF: I wonder if it's ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens. Do you suppose it's ethical even if you prove he didn't commit a crime.
LISA: I'm not much on rear window ethics.

LISA: If someone came in here, they wouldn't believe what they'd see. You and me with long faces, plunged into despair because we find out a man didn't kill his wife. We're two of the most frightening ghouls I've ever known.

STELLA: Let's go down and find out what's buried in the garden.
LISA: Why not? I've always wanted to meet Mrs. Thorwald.

Compiled by Rob Nixon