NIGHT HAS 100O EYES, THE WINDOW, REAR WINDOW, OBSESSION, NIGHTMARE.
MANY PERIOD NOIRS TACKLE THE ISSUES OF DREAMS, NIGHTMARES, AND THE HIDDEN ROLE AND REALITY OF PSYCHIC EVENTS AND THE PARANORMAL IN SHAPING A RELENTLESS AND INDISCRIMINATE FATE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WindowPlot
Set and filmed on location in the tenement section of New York's Lower East Side, the film tells the story of a young boy (Driscoll), who has a habit of crying wolf.
Late one night, he climbs up the building fire escape and sees two people murder a drunken sailor. No one, not even the boy's parents, believes young Tommy when he tells what he has seen, since they all assume that this is just another of the boy's tall tales.
The murderous neighbors find out the boy is a witness to the killing and plan the same for him when his parents are away. Tommy fears that the killers are out to get him, so he runs away from home only to be caught by the two.
When the film was first released,
The New York Times lauded the film and wrote, "The striking force and terrifying impact of this RKO melodrama is chiefly due to Bobby's brilliant acting, for the whole effect would have been lost were there any suspicion of doubt about the credibility of this pivotal character. Occasionally, the director overdoes things a bit in striving for shock effects, such as when the half-conscious boy teeters on the rail of a fire-escape or is trapped on a high beam in an abandoned house on the verge of collapse. However, though you may be aware of contrivance in these instances, it is not likely that you will remain immune to the excitement. Indeed, there is such an acute expression of peril etched on the boy's face and reflected by his every movement as he flees death in the crumbling house that one experiences an overwhelming anxiety for his safety."
[3]Film critic Dennis Schwartz discussed the noir aspects of the film and wrote,
"The city slum is pictured as not an easy place to raise a child, as there appears no safe place to play. Though the times have changed, this taut tale nevertheless remains gripping and realistic. The modern city is not any less dangerous than the postwar years of the 1940s (undoubtedly even more dangerous). This film noir thriller exploits the meaning of the American dream to work hard for all the material things that were becoming available and ultimately find a utopia in the suburbs, as it cries out for the children left to their own devices to survive in such harsh surroundings as their parents have become too busy to raise them properly."
[4]TV Guide praised the film and wrote in a review of the film, "...this incredibly tense nail-biter stars Driscoll as a young boy who has a habit of crying wolf...The Window presents a frightening vision of helplessness, vividly conveying childish frustration at being dismissed or ignored by one's parents. Director and onetime cameraman Tetzlaff adroitly injects a maximum of suspense into the film, enabling the audience to identify with Driscoll's predicament and, interestingly, to view his parents as evil, almost as evil as the murderers themselves.
Having photographed Hitchcock's Notorious just three years before, Tetzlaff had, without a shadow of a doubt, learned something of his suspense-building craft from the master of that art (as did just about every working director)...An exceptional film.[5] In the simplest terms it is the element that drives the tale from one incident to the next — perhaps the killer’s motive as in The Bride Wore Black, the heroes amnesia as in Black Curtain, or here, in Woolrich’s masterpiece, the possibility of psychic powers and the inevitability of fate.
Fate is always having its little joke in Woolrich’s novels and stories, and in Night Has 1000 Eyes that little joke is at its most effective, and terrible.
Night opens appropriately at night. The hero is a young detective who spots an attractive young woman attempting suicide. He stops her, only to find she is desperate and frightened out of her wits.
Her wealthy father has been threatened, but this is no ordinary threat. A man claiming psychic powers has told her that her father will die at an appointed time and cannot be saved. And this psychic is never wrong.
Never.
And that may be where this book most resembles a horror novel and not a suspense novel, because most good suspense novels let you go when they come to the end. There is a build up to incredible tension and then a release.
Not in Night Has a Thousand Eyes.
If anything this book is more disturbing when it is over.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes was well filmed by John Farrow with a fine screenplay by Barré Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer, with Gail Russell perfectly cast as the fey girl, John Lund the hero, Edward G, Robinson the psychic, William Demarest a doubting cop, and Jerome Cowan the doomed victim.
It’s a fine piece of film noir, but it is only a pale shadow of the novel. I don’t know that you could translate on film the tension that Woolrich builds in print. I’m not sure you’d want to, because as I say, Night Has a Thousand Eyes doesn’t let you off the hook. Not even when you have turned the last page and laid the book aside.
That title has the ring of some ancient bit of wisdom or poetry. It has the feel of found wisdom, of something we all knew, but never put into words before this.
The night has one thousand eyes and they are watching us. We cannot run from them, we cannot escape them. Fate will not be denied, nor can any man escape his appointed time. We all will make our own appointment in Samara on time.
And perhaps it is that inevitability that gives this novel its power. We aren’t let off with easy answers, and though the solution leaves itself fully open for rational explanation there is a cold dark corner of the soul that knows that isn’t what Woolrich was telling us.
After breaking his leg in one of his dangerous photography assignments, Jeff is confined to a wheelchair in his
Greenwich Village apartment, whose rear window looks out onto a small courtyard and several other apartments. During a summer heat wave, he passes the time by watching his neighbors, who keep their windows open to stay cool. The tenants he can see include a dancer, a lonely woman, a songwriter (
Bagdasarian), several married couples, and Thorwald, a salesman with a bedridden wife.
After Thorwald makes repeated late-night trips carrying a large case, Jeff notices that Thorwald's wife is gone and sees Thorwald cleaning a large knife and handsaw. Later, Thorwald ties a large packing crate with heavy rope and has moving men haul it away. After discussing these observations, Jeff, Stella and Lisa conclude that Thorwald murdered his wife.
Jeff asks Doyle to look into the situation, but Doyle finds nothing suspicious. Soon a neighbor's dog is found dead with its neck broken. When a woman sees the dog and screams, the neighbors all rush to their windows to see what has happened, except for Thorwald, whose cigar can be seen glowing as he sits in his dark apartment.
Convinced that Thorwald is guilty after all, Jeff has Lisa slip an accusatory note under Thorwald's door so Jeff can watch his reaction when he reads it. Then, as a pretext to get Thorwald away from his apartment, Jeff telephones him and arranges a meeting at a bar. He thinks Thorwald may have buried something in the courtyard flower patch and then killed the dog to keep it from digging it up. When Thorwald leaves, Lisa and Stella dig up the flowers but find nothing.
Lisa then climbs the fire escape to Thorwald's apartment and squeezes in through an open window. When Thorwald returns and grabs Lisa, Jeff calls the police, who arrive in time to save her. With the police present, Jeff sees Lisa with her hands behind her back, wiggling her finger with Mrs. Thorwald's wedding ring on it. Thorwald also sees this, realizes that she is signaling to someone, and notices Jeff across the courtyard.
Jeff phones Doyle, now convinced that Thorwald is guilty of something, and Stella heads for the police station to bail Lisa out, leaving Jeff alone. He soon realizes that Thorwald is coming to his apartment. When Thorwald enters the apartment and approaches him, Jeff repeatedly sets off his flashbulbs, temporarily blinding Thorwald. Thorwald grabs Jeff and pushes him towards the open window as Jeff yells for help. Jeff falls to the ground just as some police officers enter the apartment and others run to catch him. Thorwald confesses to the murder of his wife and the police arrest him.
A few days later, the heat has lifted and Jeff rests peacefully in his wheelchair, now with casts on both legs. The lonely neighbor woman chats with the songwriter in his apartment, the dancer's lover returns home from the Army, the couple whose dog was killed have a new dog, and the newly married couple are bickering. In the last scene of the film, Lisa reclines beside Jeff, appearing to read a book on foreign travel in order to please him, but as soon as he is asleep, she puts the book down and happily opens a fashion magazine.
A "benefit world premiere" for the film, with
United Nations officials and "prominent members of the social and entertainment worlds"
[5] in attendance, was held on August 4, 1954 in New York City, with proceeds going to the
American-Korean Foundation (an aid organization founded soon after the end of the
Korean War[6] and headed by
President Eisenhower's brother).
Critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times attended that premiere, and in his review called the film a "tense and exciting exercise" and Hitchcock a director whose work has a "maximum of build-up to the punch, a maximum of carefully tricked deception and incidents to divert and amuse"; Crowther also notes:[5]Mr. Hitchcock's film is not "significant." What it has to say about people and human nature is superficial and glib. But it does expose many facets of the loneliness of city life and it tacitly demonstrates the impulse of morbid curiosity. The purpose of it is sensation, and that it generally provides in the colorfulness of its detail and in the flood of menace toward the end. A "benefit world premiere" for the film, with
United Nations officials and "prominent members of the social and entertainment worlds"
[5] in attendance, was held on August 4, 1954 in New York City, with proceeds going to the
American-Korean Foundation (an aid organization founded soon after the end of the
Korean War[6] and headed by
President Eisenhower's brother). Critic
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times attended that premiere, and in his review called the film a "tense and exciting exercise" and Hitchcock a director whose work has a "maximum of build-up to the punch, a maximum of carefully tricked deception and incidents to divert and amuse"; Crowther also notes:
[5]Mr. Hitchcock's film is not "significant." What it has to say about people and human nature is superficial and glib. But it does expose many facets of the loneliness of city life and it tacitly demonstrates the impulse of morbid curiosity. The purpose of it is sensation, and that it generally provides in the colorfulness of its detail and in the flood of menace toward the end.
Nearly 30 years after the film's initial release, Roger Ebert reviewed the Universal re-release in October 1983, after Hitchcock's estate was settled. He said the film "develops such a clean, uncluttered line from beginning to end that we're drawn through it (and into it) effortlessly. The experience is not so much like watching a movie, as like ...
well, like spying on your neighbors. Hitchcock traps us right from the first....And because Hitchcock makes us accomplices in Stewart's voyeurism, we're along for the ride. When an enraged man comes bursting through the door to kill Stewart, we can't detach ourselves, because we looked too, and so we share the guilt and in a way we deserve what's coming to him."
[9] Other issues such as voyeurism and feminism are analyzed in
John Belton's book Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window".
Rear Window is a voyeuristic film. As Stella (
Thelma Ritter) tells Jeff,
"We've become a race of Peeping Toms." This applies equally to the cinema as well as to real life. Stella invokes the specifically sexual pleasures of looking that is identified as exemplary of classical Hollywood.
The majority of the film is seen through Jeff's visual point of view and his mental perspective. Stella's words sum up Hitchcock's broader project as film maker, namely, to implicate us as spectators. While Jeff is watching the rear window people, we too are being "peeping toms" as we watch him, and the people he watches as well. As a voyeristic society, we take personal pleasure in watching what is going on around us.
Ownership
Ownership of the copyright in
Woolrich's original story was eventually litigated before the
United States Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990). The film was copyrighted in 1954 by Patron Inc. — a production company set up by Hitchcock and Stewart. As a result, Stewart and Hitchcock's estate became involved in the Supreme Court case.
Rear Window is one of several of Hitchcock's films originally released by Paramount Pictures, for which Hitchcock retained the copyright, and which was later acquired by Universal Studios in 1983 from Hitchcock's estate.
[
edit] Influence
Rear Window has been repeatedly re-told, parodied, or referenced.
Nightmare is a
1956 psychological thriller starring
Edward G. Robinson. The story is based on a novel by
William Irish (aka
Cornell Woolrich). The novel was also made into a film in 1947 titled,
Fear in the Night. The film was directed by long-time movie writer
Maxwell Shane,
later the producer of the classic horror anthology Thriller in the early 1960s. He directed both versions of the film. Also appearing in the film as the movie's big band is
Billy May and His Orchestra.
[
edit] Plot
New Orleans big band clarinetist Stan Grayson has a nightmare where he sees himself in a
mirrored room killing a man. He wake ups and finds blood on himself, bruises on his neck, and a key from the dream in his hand. He goes to his brother-in-law, police detective Rene Bressard, about the problem but is dismissed. Later, the two men go on a picnic in the country with Grayson's girlfriend and sister. Grayson leads them to an empty house, the house of his dream, when it begins to rain. They are shocked to see that the house has a mirrored room just like in his dream. After it’s found out that a murder did indeed take place, Grayson becomes Bressard's number one suspect. Grayson, stressed out and suicidal, protests his innocence which makes Bressard dig deeper.
That leads to them finding out about a hypnotist in Grayson's building that apparently set up the band member for murder.
Director:
Jean Delannoy Starring:
Michèle Morgan, Raf Vallone, Marthe Mercadier, Jean Gaven, Albert Duvaleix
SynopsisHélène and Aldo Giovanni are a couple who form a popular circus trapeze double act. When Aldo is injured, he is replaced temporarily by Alexandre, a former partner. Jealous, Aldo gets into a fight with Alexandre and, the following day, the latter is found dead, having been shot. A witness to the fight, Hélène suspects her husband of the murder. Her fears are confirmed when she finds a revolver amongst Aldo’s luggage. Then the husband of a close friend is arrested and accused of Alexandre’s murder… Should Hélène denounce her husband to save an innocent man from the scaffold?
Credits
Director:
Jean DelannoyScript: Antoine Blondin,
Jean Delannoy, Roland Laudenbach, Gian Luigi Rondi, Cornell Woolrich
Photo: Pierre Montazel
Music: Paul Misraki
Cast:
Michèle Morgan (Hélène Giovanni), Raf Vallone (Aldo Giovanni), Marthe Mercadier (Arlette Bernardin), Jean Gaven (Alexandre Buisson), Albert Duvaleix (Barnet), Robert Dalban (Inspecteur Chardin), Louis Seigner (L’avocat général), Olivier Hussenot (Louis Bernardin), Jacques Castelot (Me Ritter), Jean Toulout (Le président des assises), Dora Doll (L’entraîneuse), Raphaël Patorni (Bertrand)
Country: France / Italy
Language: French
Runtime: 100 min
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