Alfred Hitchcock’s visual adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s short story ‘It had to be Murder’ titled ‘Rear Window’ took a few artistic liberties in regards to details along the plot of the original work.
The details regarding the artistic liberties regard the addition of characters in order to manipulate the plot in a more aesthetic way, such as how in the short story, the main character, Jeff, has no romantic interest, but in the movie, his girlfriend plays a massive roll in helping him solve the mystery of the murder. She acts as a friend, a guide, a reflection of his inner-feelings, which in the short story is played by his helper, Sam, which in the film is also doubled onto the roll of his insurance company’s nurse.
The creation of the romantic interest also allowed for a deeper character development of Jeff, since we were able to look more deeply into his life and into his career, which was the life of a photographer, or as Lisa put it, “a spectator” which is what he is since he mainly spies and figures out the lives of his neighbors. His main struggle in this film is to decide whether to play an active, or a passive role in his neighborhood, a question every spectator must at least once ask himself.
There are many “gramatical” uses of this film in order to further convey the director’s main goal of the piece. Deliberate choices such as the great amount of high-angle shots, and how there is no scene in the entire film that was shot outside of the small room or out of Jeff’s point of view, only add to the limited perception that we are exposed to, making us feel as Jeff feels and discover things as Jeff does.
It was also very effective how the director of the film decided to frame each of the neighbor’s window as a square, symbolizing each neighbor being exposed by a TV screen, because in television shows, the actors aren’t supposed to be aware of having any audiences and people look into their lives as a form of entertainment, which is exactly how Jeff saw his very own neighbors, as a way to pass the time, as live, unscripted entertainment, the premature version of reality television programs.
I liked how there were barely any references to the time era in the short story, and it could have happened in any decade at any (recent) point in time in the last hundred years, but that Hitchcock decided to illustrate it in the current decade and so we, as the viewers of future generations, get an insight on the personal lives and intimate relations of the society of the nineteen-fifties, with their fashion choices and habits and ways of speaking. It is very demonstrative of the times, and it is always entertaining to see how the times have changed. It is also interesting what was considered to be aesthetically pleasing, or beautiful, at the time, since both of the main actors were considered attractive for their time. Seeing how the standards of beauty have shifted will never cease to amaze me.
Slight additions to thicken the plot such as adding the neighbor’s yappy dog or the more in-depth description of the other neighbors (such as when the pianist’s music saved the lonely lady from suicide, and how they ended up together) was also an artistic choice on the director’s part which add to the storyline and make it much more appealing and effective regarding the explanation of the connection between neighbors and the seemingly detached neighbors that are apparently all somehow connected by their relative closeness to one another, by living in the same complex, which is highly accentuated to when the yappy dog’s owner goes on a dramatic shpeal over the lack of sense of community by all the inhabitants of the surrounding buildings, and how their society had degraded into detached, individualized cubicles in which no one noticed anybody else’s lives, but their own.
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