Where to watch Rear Window (1954)
Rear Window is available to stream in US on YouTube TV. It can also be rented or bought from AppleTV and Amazon.
A wheelchair-bound photographer passes the time watching neighbors from his apartment window. When one neighbor’s wife disappears and suspicious behavior follows, he begins investigating from afar, drawing his skeptical girlfriend and nurse into a tense mystery that also examines curiosity, privacy, and relationships.
Cast: Grace Kelly, James Stewart, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr, Judith Evelyn, Ross Bagdasarian, Georgine Darcy, Sara Berner, Frank Cady, Jesslyn Fax, Rand Harper
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Trivia & production notes
- The screenplay was adapted from Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story It Had to Be Murder by John Michael Hayes.
- A 1990 Supreme Court case determined ownership of the film rights to Woolrich's original story, resulting in Sheldon Abend being credited as a producer on the 1998 Rear Window remake.
- The entire film was shot on a single stage at Paramount Studios featuring an enormous indoor set replicating a Greenwich Village courtyard that stretched from the basement to the ceiling lighting grid.
- Set designers Hal Pereira and Joseph MacMillan Johnson spent six weeks constructing what became Paramount's largest set of its kind, complete with a massive drainage system built specifically for the rain sequence.
- The opening 90-second uninterrupted scene introducing the main character and neighborhood required ten takes over half a day to complete.
- The lighting system was rigged with four interchangeable arrangements to simulate morning, afternoon, evening, and nighttime scenes.
- Although Franz Waxman is credited with the score, his work was limited to the opening and closing titles and one piano tune, with the rest of the soundtrack consisting of diegetic music and sounds.
- The film includes Bing Crosby singing a song from the 1952 Paramount film Road to Bali, along with music by Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Leonard Bernstein, and selections from classical opera.
- In 1997, Rear Window was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
- The film inspired other directors to explore voyeurism as a theme, including Brian De Palma's Body Double in 1984 and Phillip Noyce's Sliver in 1993.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article Rear Window, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.
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