Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Woolrich’s story is missing the shapely “Miss Torso” who limbers up and dances in a seemingly constant state of undress, as well as the lady sculptor and the song composer, who complete the “little stories” (Hitchcock’s words) that are glimpsed through Jeff’s binoculars.
Although Hayes insisted in later interviews that “Hitch left it up to me to create the scenes and he liked what I created,” assistant director Herbert Coleman, who was present for their initial meeting and others, recalled Hitchcock describing the scenes at great length, and with his usual wealth of detail. The director worked with Hayes, on
Rear Window
and their other films, the way he always worked: outlining the story scene by scene, generating specific visual or dialogue instructions. “Hitchcock walked around the office dictating the story as he had it in his mind,” said Coleman, “and John Michael Hayes sat at a typewriter and typed what was dictated. Hitch told everything, every camera move, everything but the dialogue. When it came to the dialogue, he’d say, ‘Now, Mr. Hayes, the dialogue must convey this meaning.’ ”
While Hitchcock shot
Dial M for Murder
and tended to preproduction for
Rear Window
, Hayes went away and wrote the greatest script of his career. One of the things Hitchcock liked about Hayes was his no-nonsense efficiency. Although Hitchcock’s time would be less constrained in the years ahead, the director nonetheless kept up a furious pace, and he valued a writer who could keep up with him. Hayes’s seventy-six-page treatment was completed by September 1953, and the full script began to arrive in sections in October. Even after that, Hitchcock and Hayes continued “writing by camera,” according to Hayes. “We went over it line by line and page by page. What we did then was try to break it up into shots. Now Hitch wanted to set them up into actual camera angles. He had a large sketch pad on which he sketched out each camera setup.”
Hayes was initially signed to write three pictures for Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, but the director was so pleased with the first job that his contract was torn up and another film was added. Including
Rear Window
, Hayes would be paid fifteen thousand dollars a week to write four Hitchcock films over the next three years.
By September, Hitchcock was busily assembling his new team at Paramount. The only collaborator he brought with him from Warner Bros. was
his invaluable cameraman, Robert Burks—though Burks also took along his team, including camera operator Leonard South, who stayed with Hitchcock up through
Family Plot.
George Tomasini, a young editor under Paramount contract, was a find. He had only a handful of credits, but they included Billy Wilder’s
Stalag 17
, and Hitchcock admired Wilder’s films. Tomasini would edit every one of Hitchcock’s films from
Rear Window
through
Marnie
(with the sole exception of
The Trouble with Harry
)—nine Hitchcock pictures, more than any other editor.
Paramount also reunited Hitchcock with Edith Head, who had designed the costumes for
Notorious
, and who, from now to the end of his career (sometimes uncredited), would watch over the hair and wardrobe of his leading ladies.
Hal Pereira has routinely been credited with the production design of the films Hitchcock directed at Paramount. But Pereira was the department head, and the real work was done by key subordinates behind the scenes. The creator of the
Rear Window
set was a Selznick veteran, Joseph MacMillan Johnson, who had been an artist on
Gone With the Wind
and later shared an Oscar for special photography on
Portrait of Jennie.
Paramount also meant a reunion with John P. Fulton, who had helped Hitchcock achieve the special effects for
Saboteur.
Now under contract to Paramount, Fulton—and John Goodman, the art director of
Shadow of a Doubt
—would work on the Hitchcock films of the 1950s.
The set was a proud accomplishment. Most of the close photography would center on Jeff (James Stewart), sitting in a single room with a window that looked out onto a crowded courtyard. The courtyard, as seen from his window, contained multileveled apartments, gardens, trees, fire escapes, smoking chimneys, and an alley leading to a street with a bar, pedestrians, moving traffic—all of it capped by a Manhattan skyline. There were thirty-one apartments in all, twelve fully furnished. The set had to be elaborately prelit for day and night, with remote switches controlling the lighting. Although most of the film’s shots were taken from the vantage point of Jeff’s apartment, the other dwellings and occupants had to be identifiable in long-range shots that would deliver both clear definition and adequate depth of field. (Their coded costuming helped their identification; Miss Lonelyhearts, for example, would be the only character always to dress in emerald green.) The faraway actors carried tiny microphones, through which they received instructions, walkie-talkie-style, from Hitchcock. All this demanded innovation from the camera and sound experts.
Hitchcock’s intermediary with Paramount, and his top deputy on
Rear Window
, was a Kentucky native who had started at the studio as a driver in
1927.
Herbert Coleman had just finished working as assistant director
to William Wyler on
Roman Holiday
; now the studio assigned him to assist Hitchcock. Coleman picked C. O. “Doc” Ericksen to be the production manager—and Hitchcock immediately dispatched Ericksen to New York for photographs and sketches of Greenwich Village courtyards of the sort he had noticed while visiting John Houseman’s apartment earlier in the 1950s. Coleman and Ericksen both lasted with the director throughout the Paramount years, Hitchcock’s most cohesive decade.
Besides being together constantly during preproduction and photography, Coleman and Ericksen met with Hitchcock between the films and often traveled with him. They admired him (“Mr. Hitchcock” seemed his due, and they initially felt awkward when urged to call him “Hitch”), and considered him a warm, humorous, equable taskmaster, even a friend. Their can-do attitude was one of the positives of the Paramount years. Hitchcock would miss them when they were away, and interrupt whatever he was doing and beeline over to see them when they showed up. “Herbie and I smiled as much as anyone could imagine,” said Ericksen. “We were always upbeat.”
Hitchcock assembled another sparkling supporting cast—starting with Thelma Ritter as Stella, the comedy-relief nurse. Reliably funny with sharp-tongued characters, Ritter had entered films in 1947 and racked up four Academy Award nominations in six years. Another Paramount contract player, dependable Wendell Corey, was lined up as the detective: pinpointed as a World War II buddy of Jeff’s, he would play a larger role than his character did in the original Cornell Woolrich story.
Although they have no scripted dialogue and are glimpsed only from afar through their apartment windows, future
Chipmunks
creator Ross Bagdasarian (the composer), Judith Evelyn (Miss Lonelyhearts), and Georgine Darcy (Miss Torso) made even the film’s minor characters memorable. And Raymond Burr, who was still specializing in heavies at this stage of his career, was picked to play Thorwald. Hitchcock had Burr made up in short curly hair and spectacles, and then costumed in white button-down shirts. His chain-smoking was the last Hitchcockian nuance—all, the director told later interviewers, to evoke David O. Selznick.
Hurdling the Production Code seemed increasingly easy for Hitchcock. Luck was with him during the Paramount years, and, besides, the rules of censorship were finally changing.
Production Code administrator Joseph Breen, who had been Hitchcock’s nemesis since
Rebecca
, criticized the first draft of
Rear Window
on every imaginable count: for its leering depiction of Miss Torso; for the scene in which Miss Lonelyhearts welcomes to her apartment a young man whose “hand is doing something with the slide fastener at the back of her
dress”; for Stella’s toilet humor (“When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country has to let go”); for the new-lywed couple caught up in the “sexual aspects of a honeymoon”; for the constant dialogue that suggested a sexual relationship between Jeff and Lisa; and especially for the lines that implied Lisa was going to stay overnight in Jeff’s apartment—a fact that becomes plain as sin in the film when she shows off a sexy negligee.
Paramount wasn’t as prudish as Warner Bros., though, and allowed its autonomous units to take the lead in fending off the Code. First finding an ally in Luigi Luraschi, the studio’s liaison with censorship authorities, Hitchcock invited Code officials to Paramount to marvel at the set. Treating them like royalty, he smoothly reviewed the objectionable elements. Almost everything they saw as an issue, he explained, would be staged far away from the camera—too far to matter. “Having seen the extraordinary set, and noting that the action in the surrounding apartments would be photographed from the viewpoint of the protagonist’s apartment,” wrote Steven DeRosa in
Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes
, “many of their concerns had been eliminated.”
Hitchcock then filmed Miss Torso several different ways: once topless from behind, once in white lingerie, and once in black, playing the racy versions off against each other for Code officials. He made minor compromises in scenes, exaggerating their importance, but “in spite of Breen’s objections,” wrote DeRosa, “many of these elements remain, verbatim, in the finished picture.”
Timing was on his side: after twenty years as the top cop of Hollywood morality, Joseph Breen was nearing retirement by the time
Rear Window
went before the cameras. No one followed through on many of his objections to the script. And Breen was replaced by the Englishman Geoffrey M. Shurlock, who was more open and liberal in his attitude, more open (and resigned) to the idea that screen values were moving with the times.
Some directors create their best films out of angst, cheap budgets, impossible schedules, and stars or projects that inspire in them conflict or indifference. But Hitchcock found his greatest inspiration during times of security and contentment, filming stories that took a leisurely amount of time to germinate, and which delved deeper into familiar, favorite themes. He could be marvelous on a shoestring, but he made his greatest films with first-class budgets.
By the time he began filming
Rear Window
in October, Hitchcock was an almost svelte Master of Suspense. He had dieted down from his all-time high of some 340 pounds to his all-time low of 189. He had “seldom
been happier,” wrote John Russell Taylor. “I was feeling very creative at the time,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut. “The batteries were well-charged.”
Hitchcock had been credited as producer of the Transatlantic and Warner Bros. films, but Paramount gave him more power and authority, with fewer strings attached. And greater purse strings: after
Rear Window
—which was planned from the start as a soundstage-bound film, as much for the challenge as anything—Hitchcock was allowed to splurge on travel. It wasn’t simply that he was enamored of location work, which involved a certain amount of risk; but going places, adding dashes of local flavor, was vital to Hitchcockery. And there were more personal considerations: Alma had stopped coming into the studio, but she adored travel, and if Hitchcock was working on a location she would accompany him, and even follow him to the set from time to time. The Paramount films went to places the Hitchcocks wanted to visit together.
For seven years, Jack Warner had balked at paying what he considered the stratospheric salaries of Cary Grant and James Stewart. Actors under studio contract came cheaper, made no special demands, and didn’t skim off percentages. But Paramount was willing to structure Hitchcock’s budgets so the director could afford Stewart and Grant.
The two stars were as different in their professionalism as in their onscreen personas. While Grant could be a royal pain, fussy and demanding in his approach to a film, Stewart punched into work like a guy carrying a tin lunch box. Stewart was more of a partner, and the Hitchcock-Stewart films were organized as partnerships, with Stewart’s company sharing a percentage of the gross and profits—and risk. As with
Rope
, Stewart paid himself a reduced salary, taking the chance of making more money on the back end. The director knew from experience that such an arrangement wouldn’t work with Cary Grant, but after
Rope
, Stewart would be involved this way in each of his other three films with Hitchcock, from the script stage through to the end of production.
Hitchcock and Stewart had a peculiar friendship; they were intimate but also proper with each other, close but also businesslike. Stewart wasn’t much of a gossiper, a chuckler at dirty stories, or a practical joker. He attended at least one “blue dye” dinner party at Bellagio Road, where Hitchcock served blue martinis, blue steak, and blue potatoes to the guests, but thereafter he was a rarer visitor to the Hitchcock houses, in Bel Air or up in Santa Cruz. (It worked the other way around; Hitchcock visited Stewart, often at his vacation home in Hawaii.)
In meetings or on the set they didn’t talk much. They had more of an unspoken communion, sharing amused glances—like Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock.
Here is Stewart, tongue half in cheek, on the director:
“I never once saw him look through a camera. Uh, maybe he couldn’t get up. He’d make a little screen with his hands and the poor cameraman, whoever he was, had to get back there and look at it, and Hitch would say, ‘This is what I want.’
“I don’t think Hitch paid much attention to a ‘star image.’ I never heard Hitch discuss a scene with an actor. He never did with me. I heard him say that he hired actors—you know, the ‘cattle’ as he referred to them—because they were supposed to know what they were doing. When he said ‘Action,’ he expected them to do what he hired them to do.
“Every once in a while after shooting a scene Hitch would get out of his chair and come up to me. Then he would very quietly say, ‘Jim, the scene is tired.’ He would then go back to his chair and sit down, and you would know exactly what he meant, that the timing and the pace were wrong.”