Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538125
41 F A L L Q 3 I S S U E B O O K R E V I E W devised for the director to communicate to actors in adjacent apartments. Assistant director Herbert Coleman and Paramount sound department head George Dutton arrived at a solution: "The sound crew had little receivers they normally used for dance sequences when they hid them in actors' ears so they could hear the tempo of the music while performing. Hitchcock would use these same devices to instruct his actors, and the most fun part — when he gave directions, they wouldn't be able to say anything back." Meanwhile, a tour of this astonishing set given to industry enforcers of the Motion Picture Production Code — on edge about the movie's voyeuris- tic elements — had the intended effect: it wowed them. "We readily agreed that the camera location and nature of this rather extraordinary set eliminated much of the concern felt in reading the script material," said Paramount liaison to the Motion Pic- ture Association of America, Luigi Luraschi. O'Callaghan digs up a quote from Stew- art in which he mused about Hitchcock's method of intercutting close-ups of the actor with various happenings across the courtyard. "I spent an astonishing amount of time looking into the camera and being amused, afraid, worried, embarrassed, bored, the works," Stewart said in an inter- view with Roger Ebert. What might have seemed inscrutable to Stewart, however, was crystal clear to Hitchcock, who was working for the first time with the man who would become his longtime picture editor, George Tomasini, ACE. According to O'Cal- laghan, Hitchcock prescribed exact cuts to Tomasini — "Okay, cut three frames there. Add seven there" — but she acknowledges that "Rear Window" was "a tricky beast to edit" without "room for even a millisecond of error." "After an eternity of meticulous starting and stopping, the film got to a point where it could be viewed all the way through," she writes. Although Hitchcock maintained "his typical blank expression" upon its conclusion, he told the editor, "I think we have a movie." Typical understate- ment from the Master of Suspense, who, of course, knew what he had: As O'Callaghan writes, "he wouldn't dream of shooting one reel of film without creative storyboards in place for action sequences." Those reading t h i s b o o k w i t h a n eye (o r e a r ) towa rd post-production will also find helpful the account of the work of composer Franz Waxman and the overall sound design, in which "snippets of songs and street sounds drift through the Waxman soundtrack, in and out of courtyard windows." Preview audiences rounded up for an April 1954 screening at the Academy The- atre in Pasadena generated the usual mixed report. One commentator complained, "Too many suggestive comments," while another nit-picked on story points: "Why did he kill his wife? What was in the hat- box?" Critics, though positive, were not as effusive as they might have been, with Time magazine pointing to "occasional studied lapses of taste." Years later, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby summarized the prevailing contemporary critical read on the film: "There was a certain amount of self-righteous outrage directed at the film's seemingly casual attitude toward voyeur- ism, sometimes called 'Peeping Tomism.'" Yet general audiences assured that the mov- ie made money ($5.3 million in revenue). Needing enough material to sustain a book, O'Callaghan ventures beyond "Rear Window," including into the subsequent lives and careers of its principals. All of this is well told, but in the context of the vast trove of previous books on Hitch- cock, Stewart, and Kelly, it reads like a bite-sized condensation of their lives and times. The book is stronger as a deep dive into "Rear Window" than a superf icial survey of Hitchcock and company — but, happily, O'Callaghan returns to the film as her focal point as her book wraps up. The 1998 remake starring Christopher Reeve is discussed, as are those films that operated under the influence of the Hitchcock classic, including many (many) works by Brian De Palma, who is quoted thus: "Hitchcock pioneered a whole type of film grammar. He taught us how to express things as clearly, visually, I think, as they can be expressed." Most interesting are various postscripts to "Rear Window" itself. After Hitchcock's death, Universal Classics president James C. Katz endeavored to secure the rights to re-release Hitchcock's so-called "forbidden five"—the quintet of films to which the filmmaker's heirs had walked away with the rights and which were, consequently, not readily screenable for many years. "These films were the Hitchcocks' bread and butter, and they wouldn't be parting with them without a fight," O'Callaghan writes. In time, Katz prevailed, and "Rear Window," one of the five films to which Universal Classics had gained the right to rerelease, was the hit of the 1983 New York Film Festival, O'Callaghan reports. "The audience was really with it, and I thought that was just amazing," Stewart said at the time to The New York Times. "It just bears out the feeling that so many of us had about Hitch and his way of doing things." Katz and film archivist Robert A. Harris later undertook an ambitious restoration of "Rear Window" that made its way to theaters in 2000, including at a cinema center in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, with the gentlemanly Katz in attendance to i n t ro d u ce t h e re s to ra t i o n a n d ta ke questions. I was 16, and it was my first time seeing "Rear Window" on the big screen. I can attest to Katz's general account of audience response to seeing the film in this marvelous restored version. "It was fas- cinating to see the reaction of people who had never seen it before," he said. "Young students, including my kids at the time of the restoration, were born during the dead period of 'Rear Window,' so they were not exposed to it until then." With luck, this enthusiastic and en- gaging book will promote the greatness of "Rear Window" for future film students, enthusiasts of montage, and cinematic Peeping Toms. ■ "Rear Window: The Making of a Hitchcock Masterpiece in the Hollywood Golden Age" By Jennifer O'Callaghan - 272 pages - Citadel Press - $29 - 2025