90 Fun Facts About Rear Window

In Rear Window, where did Jeff break his leg?

A racetrack: on assignment, he stood in the middle of it for a dramatic view of a motor race, and a wheel flew off a skidding car. The 1954 film reveals the crash without a word, in its opening shot.

In Rear Window, who plays the laid-up hero, L. B. 'Jeff' Jefferies?

James Stewart was a partner in the film as well as its star. He and Hitchcock set up the company that produced it, and he worked for a share of the profits instead of a salary.

In Rear Window, who plays Jeff's socialite girlfriend, Lisa Fremont?

Grace Kelly won that year's Best Actress Oscar, though not for this glamorous part. The Academy honoured her for playing a careworn wife in The Country Girl.

In Rear Window, what is Jeff's profession?

Photojournalist Jeff insists that Lisa is too pampered for his rough life on the road. He thinks again when she climbs a fire escape in high heels to search a suspected killer's flat.

In Rear Window, which New York neighborhood is home to Jeff's apartment?

Greenwich Village really has such a courtyard: the film's set was modelled on one at 125 Christopher Street. The address given on screen, 125 West Ninth Street, does not exist.

In Rear Window, who plays Stella, the plain-spoken nurse who tends to Jeff?

Thelma Ritter's Stella begins by scolding Jeff that snoopers once had their eyes put out with a red-hot poker. By the end the nurse is out in the courtyard digging for evidence herself.

In Rear Window, who plays the suspected wife-killer Lars Thorwald?

Raymond Burr had spent years playing heavies like Thorwald. Three years later he changed sides, and his defence lawyer Perry Mason won him two Emmys.

In Rear Window, what is Lars Thorwald's job?

A costume-jewelry salesman has a sample case, which seems to explain his trips out in the rain at night. Lisa is not convinced: no woman, she argues, goes away and leaves her favourite handbag behind.

In Rear Window, who plays Jeff's skeptical detective friend, Tom Doyle?

Wendell Corey's detective checks the story as a favour and comes back with witnesses who saw Thorwald leave for the railway station with a woman. For a while, Jeff's theory collapses.

In Rear Window, what nickname does Jeff give the dancer across the courtyard?

Miss Torso spends the film fending off well-dressed admirers. In the last scene her true love comes home: Stanley, a bespectacled soldier who heads straight for the refrigerator.

In Rear Window, what does Jeff watch the neighbour he calls 'Miss Lonely-Hearts' doing?

Mimes dates with unseen guests: she lays a table for two and welcomes a caller who is not there. Later she sets out a handful of red pills, and only music from the songwriter's flat stops her.

Rear Window's struggling songwriter was played by Ross Bagdasarian, who later created what?

Alvin and the Chipmunks grew out of his tinkering with a tape recorder's speed control. He first used the trick as 'David Seville' on 'Witch Doctor', a number one hit in 1958.

In Rear Window, what does the anonymous note Jeff sends to Thorwald say?

What have you done with her? Jeff prints the question in block capitals, and it is the wheelchair-bound man's girlfriend who has to cross the courtyard and slip it under the suspect's door.

Where does Hitchcock make his cameo in Rear Window?

Winding a clock in the songwriter's apartment is his whole part. He stands behind the composer at the piano on the film's first evening, while Lisa is serving Jeff dinner across the way.

In Rear Window, what does Jeff hear on the night Mrs. Thorwald vanishes?

A scream and breaking glass are all he hears. He then watches Thorwald come and go in the rain with a case, but he is asleep when the man finally walks out with a woman.

In Rear Window, what does Thorwald wrap in newspaper the day after his wife disappears?

A knife and a handsaw, then a trunk tied with rope: to Jeff it adds up to murder. His detective friend is unmoved, asking whether Jeff has ever owned a saw, and how many people he cut up with it.

In Rear Window, whose death in the courtyard revives Jeff's suspicion of Thorwald?

A little dog is found dead, and its owner's cries bring every neighbour to a window but one: Thorwald sits on in his dark flat. The animal had been digging in his flowerbed the day before.

How does Lisa signal to Jeff that she has found evidence in Thorwald's apartment?

Pointing to her ring finger behind her back, she shows Jeff she is wearing Mrs. Thorwald's wedding band. Thorwald notices the gesture and follows it across the courtyard to Jeff's window.

How does Jeff defend himself when Thorwald finally comes to his darkened apartment?

Blinding him with flashbulbs buys Jeff only seconds: each burst stops Thorwald in his tracks, then he comes on again. The police arrive just as he is tipping Jeff out of the window.

In Rear Window, where does Thorwald confess to dumping his wife's remains?

The East River is no surprise to Stella, who had guessed as much hours before the arrest. Her curiosity fails her only at the end, when she is offered a look inside the hat box and declines.

In Rear Window's final shot, what does Lisa swap her book for once Jeff dozes off?

A fashion magazine: Harper's Bazaar replaces the Himalayan travel book she holds while Jeff is awake. She has put on jeans for his sake, but the film's last joke is that she has not changed at all.

Rear Window is based on a 1942 short story by which crime writer?

Cornell Woolrich reprinted the story in 1944 under his pen name, William Irish. The film keeps his premise and little else: a court later judged that the story played only a small part in its success.

Who wrote the screenplay for Rear Window?

John Michael Hayes came from radio, where he had written both comedy and suspense. The script won him an Edgar Award and an Oscar nomination, and Hitchcock kept him on for his next three films.

What grips New York throughout Rear Window and breaks only in the final scene?

A heat wave is why every blind is up and one couple sleeps out on the fire escape, which is what lets Jeff see into so many lives at once. Relief comes only in the closing scene.

Where was Rear Window's entire New York courtyard actually built?

A Hollywood sound stage: Paramount's Stage 18 held 31 apartments around a courtyard sunk below floor level, so that five-storey buildings could stand under one roof. Building it took about six weeks.

How does Rear Window's final scene show Jeff?

Both legs in casts: thrown from his own rear window, he breaks the good leg too. When the film began he was a week from having the first cast taken off.

In Rear Window, what tells Jeff that Thorwald's flowerbed has been dug up?

An old slide: taken two weeks earlier, it shows the blooms standing taller than they do now. Flowers do not grow shorter, Jeff reasons, so someone has dug them up and put them back.

In Rear Window, who sends Stella to nurse Jeff?

His insurance company sends Stella, who boasts a nose that can smell trouble ten miles away. She smells it in his flat at once, warning that all his window-watching will land him in court.

In Rear Window, which crooner's voice is heard singing 'To See You Is to Love You' across the courtyard?

Bing Crosby had sung it two years earlier in Road to Bali, another Paramount picture. Rear Window has almost no background score: nearly all its music, like this song, drifts in from the neighbours' flats.

Which composer is credited with Rear Window's score, though most of its music comes from the neighbours' radios?

Franz Waxman wrote only the title music and the tune the songwriter struggles with throughout. It was his last job for Hitchcock, whose first Hollywood film, Rebecca, he had also scored.

Which costume designer, a Hitchcock regular for the next two decades, dressed Lisa Fremont in Rear Window?

Edith Head had worked with Hitchcock once before, on Notorious. Rear Window restarted the partnership, and she went on dressing his films down to his last, Family Plot.

Which word ends Lisa's line 'I'm not much on rear window ...'?

Ethics: Jeff has just asked whether it is right to watch a man through binoculars if he turns out to be innocent. Lisa adds that the two of them are ghouls, glum because a man did not kill his wife.

Rear Window earned which of these Oscar nominations?

Best Director was one of its four nominations, with screenplay, colour cinematography and sound recording. The film won nothing, and was not even nominated for Best Picture or for its famous set.

Which 1990 Supreme Court case decided who controlled the short story behind Rear Window?

Stewart v. Abend went 6-3 to Sheldon Abend, an agent who had bought the story's rights for $650 after its author died. The ruling meant the film could not be shown without his permission.

Rear Window was one of five Hitchcock films kept out of cinemas for years until 1983; which was another?

Vertigo vanished with it, along with Rope, The Trouble with Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Hitchcock owned all five outright and kept them from view; they returned only after his death.

Which actor made the 1998 television remake of Rear Window his first leading role since 1995?

Christopher Reeve had been paralysed in a riding accident three years earlier. The remake was rewritten around him: its hero is a quadriplegic architect whose home runs on assistive technology.

Which 2007 film retold Rear Window with a teenager under house arrest, and beat a lawsuit over it?

Disturbia swapped the plaster cast for an ankle monitor. The trust that owned the original short story sued Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks, and in 2010 a federal judge ruled the film had not copied it.

Which director's films Sisters, Dressed to Kill and Body Double borrow heavily from Rear Window?

Brian De Palma returned to it again and again. In Body Double a house-sitter watches a neighbour through a telescope and sees her attacked.

Which Simpsons episode parodies Rear Window, with a housebound spy sure that Ned Flanders has killed his wife?

Bart of Darkness puts Bart in a leg cast after he misses the family's new pool, jumping from his treehouse. Stuck in his room with a telescope, he decides that Ned has done away with Maude.

In François Truffaut's parable of Rear Window, the courtyard is the world and the reporter is what?

The filmmaker: the binoculars, Truffaut went on, stand for the camera and its lenses. He wrote it as a young critic in 1954, five years before his own first feature, The 400 Blows.

How does Jeff lure Thorwald out of his flat so the flowerbed can be dug up?

A hoax phone call: Jeff rings him as the man who knows his secret and names a hotel bar where they can talk. The two women get their few minutes with a spade, and find nothing at all.

Hitchcock learned which pie Rear Window dancer Georgine Darcy hated, then did what?

Served it to her on set: she had said pumpkin, so pumpkin pie arrived during filming, and by her own account she had to eat it through several takes. Darcy later called such stunts his little tricks.

In 1997 Rear Window was selected for preservation by which institution?

The National Film Registry took it in 1997, one of 25 films the Librarian of Congress named that year. A restoration followed: two years of frame-by-frame cleaning before a cinema re-release in 2000.

What was the original title of the 1942 short story on which Rear Window is based?

It Had to Be Murder first ran in the pulp magazine Dime Detective in February 1942. Hitchcock did not invent the famous title: reprints had already renamed the story 'Rear Window' before he filmed it.

What kind of message is scrawled on Jeff's plaster cast in Rear Window's opening shot?

A mock epitaph: 'Here lie the broken bones of L. B. Jefferies'. It is how Hitchcock gives the audience his hero's name before a single word has been spoken.

In Rear Window, Jeff's nurse complains that people have turned into 'a race of' what?

Peeping Toms, she says, and offers a cure: people ought to get outside their own houses and look in for a change. Her patient, binoculars within reach, takes no notice.

Which film did Rear Window's leading lady turn down to play Lisa?

On the Waterfront: offered the lead opposite Marlon Brando, she chose Hitchcock instead. The actress who took the part won an Oscar for it.

Which film did Hitchcock and Rear Window's screenwriter make next?

To Catch a Thief came next, in 1955, with much of the same crew. This time the camerawork won the Oscar that Rear Window's had only been nominated for.

Which studio bought Rear Window from Hitchcock's estate and put it back in cinemas in 1983?

Universal's parent company bought the film with several other Hitchcock titles in April 1983 and reissued it that October. The 1954 original had gone out under a rival's name, Paramount.

Which 1993 thriller, starring Sharon Stone as a tenant in a watched high-rise, reworked Rear Window's voyeurism?

Sliver swaps the binoculars for video: the building's owner watches every flat from a hidden room full of screens. In the end its heroine wrecks the room and tells him to get a life.

Rear Window's leading lady gave up films in 1956 to marry the prince of which tiny European state?

Monaco gained a princess in April 1956, when the film's star married Prince Rainier III and retired from acting at the age of 26.

Which television defence lawyer made a star of the actor who plays Rear Window's suspected killer?

Perry Mason ran for nine seasons from 1957 and won its star two Emmys, a sharp change for an actor the studios had usually cast as the villain.

Which singer has said Rear Window's voyeurism inspired the storytelling on her 2020 album?

Taylor Swift watched the film while quarantined and says its voyeurism shaped Folklore's storytelling. Her video for 'Me!' also features a dress modelled on one of Lisa's.

In Rear Window, what does Thorwald finally confess he had been keeping in a hat box?

His wife's head went into the hat box, Thorwald admits once he is caught, and he had moved it from its first hiding place when it was nearly unearthed.

Which Dean Martin hit of 1953 is among the tunes heard drifting across the courtyard in Rear Window?

That's Amore is part of a soundtrack built from the scene itself: Hitchcock let music drift in from the neighbours' apartments instead of leaning on a conventional score.

In Rear Window, what does Jeff push down inside his plaster cast to relieve an itch?

A back scratcher does the job: Jeff takes a long Chinese one and carefully threads it down inside the plaster until the itch is gone.

Rear Window's villain actor appeared in which 1956 monster movie, then returned to the role in 1985?

Godzilla, King of the Monsters! gave him a part he liked enough to play again three decades later, and fans credit him with bringing the series to America.

Which director was sued in 2008 by the owners of Rear Window's source story over a film he produced?

Steven Spielberg was executive producer of the 2007 teen thriller at issue, and a New York court ruled in 2010 that it did not infringe the short story.

In Rear Window, how does Lisa get into Thorwald's apartment to hunt for clues while he is out?

By the fire escape, in high heels and a full-skirted silk dress, Lisa climbs up and crawls in through the window while Jeff can only watch from his chair.

Which other Hitchcock thriller, also released in 1954, starred Rear Window's leading lady?

Dial M for Murder came first, and its star recalled that Hitchcock spent the whole shoot talking to her about the film he wanted to make next.

Rear Window's villain actor later played which San Francisco TV detective, paralysed by a sniper?

Ironside ran on NBC from 1967 to 1975, and like Jeff its hero did his detective work from a wheelchair.

In Rear Window, what do two men haul away from Thorwald's apartment soon after his wife vanishes?

A large trunk goes off with the movers, and Jeff is sure of what it holds until his detective friend tracks it down and finds only her clothes inside.

In Rear Window, where is Thorwald's nagging wife almost always seen before she disappears?

Lying in bed is how the invalid Mrs. Thorwald spends her days, waited on by the husband she belittles, so her empty bed and rolled-up mattress are what finally win Lisa over to Jeff's theory.

In Rear Window, how does Lisa's search of Thorwald's apartment end after he catches her there?

She is arrested as a burglar, and gladly: with no proof against Thorwald, a ride in a patrol car is her safest way out of his reach. Jeff's nurse sets off with the bail money.

In Rear Window, what does Jeff first pick up for a closer look at the windows across the courtyard?

Binoculars come first, then a long telephoto lens, and even Jeff's sceptical detective friend borrows them for a look across the courtyard.

In Rear Window, why does Jeff insist that marriage to the glamorous Lisa could never work?

Their lifestyles clash, he argues: he roams the globe on dangerous assignments, while she moves in a world of couture and high society.

In Rear Window, what is Thorwald doing while a cry in the courtyard brings all his neighbours out?

Smoking in the dark, alone and unmoved, Thorwald is the one tenant who never comes out to look, and the glowing tip is all Jeff can see of him.

Time's review rated Rear Window Hitchcock's most entertaining film bar one; which 1935 thriller was it?

The 39 Steps kept its crown, but the reviewer granted that there is never an instant in the newer film when Hitchcock is not in masterly control of his material.

For which 1954 drama did Rear Window's leading lady win the Best Actress Oscar in a famous upset?

The Country Girl cast her as the long-suffering wife of a has-been actor, and she beat the heavily favoured Judy Garland in one of the Oscars' big upsets.

Which Kill Bill actress played the female lead in the 1998 television remake of Rear Window?

Daryl Hannah, the mermaid of Splash, starred in an update whose quadriplegic hero, a former architect, spies on his neighbours from a wheelchair.

In Rear Window, what does detective Doyle conclude has become of the missing Mrs. Thorwald?

She left on a trip, Doyle reports, and is alive and well out of town; for a while even Jeff accepts it and begins to question his own snooping.

In Rear Window, what makes Miss Lonely-Hearts abandon her plan to take an overdose?

A neighbour's music drifts across the courtyard at just the right moment and holds her spellbound; in the last scene she is in his studio, hearing his finished song.

Which 1948 Hitchcock film, built from a few long takes, first starred Rear Window's leading man?

Rope cast him as a teacher whose two former students commit murder to prove their superiority; it was also Hitchcock's first film in Technicolor.

In Rear Window, what does Lisa do one at a time as she announces each part of her full name?

Lisa turns on the lights one by one to introduce herself, then shows off a new dress that she says cost $1,100.

Which composer's 1944 sailor ballet Fancy Free supplies music heard on Rear Window's soundtrack?

Leonard Bernstein's ballet, first danced to Jerome Robbins's choreography, later became the basis for the musical On the Town.

Which actress posed as Lisa opposite Javier Bardem in a 2008 photo shoot recreating Rear Window?

Scarlett Johansson played Lisa to Bardem's Jeff in a portfolio of photographs that restaged Hitchcock classics with present-day stars.

Rear Window's Stella actress earned the first of her six Oscar nominations for which 1950 film?

All About Eve began a run of six Best Supporting Actress nominations in twelve years, the last of them for Birdman of Alcatraz in 1962.

Which prize from the Mystery Writers of America did Rear Window's screenplay win in 1955?

The Edgar Award, named for Edgar Allan Poe, honoured the script as the year's best mystery film, and the same script earned an Oscar nomination.

Which Apollo 13 star played the housebound hero in Hartford Stage's adaptation of Rear Window?

Kevin Bacon led the cast when the Connecticut playhouse, a Tony-winning regional theatre, mounted its own adaptation of the thriller.

Rear Window's Stella actress played her first movie role in which 1947 Christmas classic?

Miracle on 34th Street put her on screen for the first time, and within three years she had the first of several Oscar nominations.

Which TV crime drama marked its 100th episode with a Rear Window homage for its housebound hero?

Castle laid up its mystery-novelist hero with an injury and let him believe he had witnessed a killing, which turns out to be a birthday surprise staged by his partner.

In Rear Window, what key sight does Jeff miss because he has finally fallen asleep?

Thorwald leaving with a woman is shown to the audience while Jeff sleeps, so viewers hold a clue he lacks: she might even be the wife he believes is dead.

Rear Window's screenwriter later wrote which 1955 Hitchcock black comedy about an unwanted corpse?

The Trouble with Harry sends a Vermont hamlet into a quiet panic over a dead man on the hillside; it was the third of four scripts he wrote for Hitchcock.

In Rear Window, Lisa has a lobster dinner delivered to Jeff from which famous Manhattan restaurant?

The 21 Club sends a red-coated waiter up with the meal and a bucket of ice, and it is he, not the laid-up Jeff, who gets the cork out of the bottle.

Rear Window competed at Venice in 1954 but lost the top prize to a film of which Shakespeare play?

Romeo and Juliet, directed by Renato Castellani, carried off the Golden Lion that year, while Hitchcock's thriller went home empty-handed.

In Rear Window, what do Lisa and Stella find when they dig up Thorwald's flowerbed?

Only bare soil is there to be found, which is why Lisa then takes the far bigger risk of searching the apartment itself.

Which Nat King Cole hit of 1950 is among the popular songs heard on Rear Window's soundtrack?

Mona Lisa shares a name with the heroine, and the film doubles the joke: the tune its struggling musician finally finishes is called 'Lisa' too.

In Rear Window, what does Lisa lower to shut off Jeff's view of the neighbours for the night?

The bamboo blinds come down once the detective has dismissed Jeff's theory; the film had opened with the same shades rising slowly under its credits.

Rear Window's source story is said to be based on 'Through a Window', an 1894 tale by which author?

H. G. Wells published his story in 1894, decades before the pulp tale it is said to have inspired, and is far better known for The War of the Worlds.

Which luxury leather-goods house made the overnight case Lisa shows off to Jeff in Rear Window?

Mark Cross gets a mention by name from Lisa as she shows the case off, in what is counted as an early example of product placement on film.