Plot Synopsis (continued)
The
next day, Jeff's nurse Stella and Lisa (in a flower-print dress)
watch out Jeff's rear window as Thorwald is seen scrubbing the walls
of the bathroom above the tub in his apartment. Stella is convinced
of a murder and states what everyone else is thinking - that Thorwald
murdered his wife and dismembered her body in the bath-tub:
Stella: Musta splattered alot. Well why not, that's
what we're all thinkin'. He killed her in there. He has to clean
up those stains before he leaves.
Lisa: Oh Stella, your choice of words.
Stella: Nobody ever invented a polite word for a killin' yet.
Viewing a two-week old Kodak slide photograph of the
garden through a viewer, Jeff anticipates what he will discover: "I
think I've solved a murder...I think I know why Thorwald killed that
dog." He compares the growth of the flowers in the flower bed,
noticing that they were taller earlier than they are now (obviously "there's
something in there. Those flowers have been taken out and put back
in"). He and Lisa suspect that some incriminating item (maybe
the knife and saw, or Mrs. Thorwald's ring) was buried there by Thorwald,
near where the overcurious dog was found. Stella has her own grotesque
theory that ignores the inconclusive burial idea: "My idea is
she's scattered all over town, a leg in the East River..."
Lisa is disgusted by the thought, but she is brave enough to propose
that they wait until it gets a little darker so she can go and dig
up the flowerbed - but her idea is promptly rejected by Jeff.
Jeff has another idea - because Thorwald has been hurriedly
packing in his apartment to leave, he proposes getting into Thorwald's
apartment as soon as possible, to ultimately locate Mrs. Thorwald's
body. He wheels himself around and prints a provocative note in large
letters: "WHAT
HAVE YOU DONE WITH HER?" and
places it in an envelope addressed:
"LARS THORWALD." Lisa volunteers to be the messenger and
stealthily delivers the note under Thorwald's door - she just misses
being detected. Jeff uses his telephoto lens to observe the operation
from his window. After reading the note and not finding anyone at his
door or on the fire escape, Thorwald goes into his back bedroom and
hastily finishes his packing. Stella is relieved:
"Thank heaven that's over."
While Lisa rushes back to the apartment, Stella asks
to use Jeff's telephoto camera: "Mind if I use that portable
keyhole?" He permits her, under one condition: "Go ahead
as long as you tell me what you're looking at." She notices
'Miss Lonelyhearts' laying out red pills (possibly in preparation
for a suicide with an overdose of pills and alcohol), and then picking
up a book with a large cross on its cover (a Bible?).
When Lisa breathlessly returns (as Jeff proudly looks
on at his hero), she eagerly and excitedly asks:
Lisa: Wasn't that close? Well, what was his reaction?
I mean when he looked at the note.
Stella: Well, it wasn't the kind of an expression that would get
him a quick loan at the bank.
Lisa: Jeff, the handbag!
They watch Lars look in his wife's handbag and then
place it in his suitcase. Both women suspect that Lars has his wife's
gold wedding band in the handbag. When Lisa asks if Stella would
ever go anywhere without her wedding band, she imagines a grisly
scenario: "The only way anybody could get that ring would be
to chop off my finger." Stella wishes to go down and find out
what's buried in the garden, and Lisa morbidly concurs that she has
always wanted to find buried remains: "Why not? I've always
wanted to meet Mrs. Thorwald." Jeff is slightly squeamish, although
Lisa is not: "If you're squeamish, just don't look." He
doesn't want them to end up with the dog's fate.
In a bold scheme to distract Lars and get him out of
the apartment for fifteen minutes so that the women can dig in the
garden, Jeff makes his first real contact with Thorwald. He phones
the salesman, identifies himself as the note's author ("Did
you get my note?"), and tells him to meet him at the bar at
the Albert Hotel "right away...a little business meeting to
settle the estate of your late wife." Thorwald promptly leaves,
presumably for the nearby hotel. Jeff tells the women that he will
be their lookout. He will signal Thorwald's return with a flash in
the window from his camera's flashbulb. In the courtyard, both women
climb the steps and garden wall, similar to the path taken by the
cat at the opening of the film, and Stella begins to dig with a shovel
where the dog used to sniff about. Jeff telephones Tom Doyle and
leaves an urgent message with his babysitter. As she digs, Stella
gestures that they haven't found anything.
In a suspenseful scene, Lisa makes a bold but potentially
reckless decision to enter and search Lars' apartment while he is
gone. Her goal is to find the incriminating evidence - the wedding
ring - that will prove Jeff's theory. [Note: Lisa actually enters
Jeff's fantasy world when all other enticements and threats to get
to his heart fail.] In her full-skirted, flowery dress, she climbs
up to his apartment via the exterior fire escape and enters through
an open window. Jeff pantomimes a protest from his window, but to
no avail. In Thorwald's bedroom, she turns the purse upside down,
showing him that it's empty - as Jeff views what she's doing through
his telephoto lens. Stella returns to Jeff's apartment, telling him
Lisa's instructions:
"Ring Thorwald's phone the second you see him come back."
Preoccupied with 'Miss Lonelyhearts' who is conducting
a suicide attempt on the ground floor due to her failure to find
a suitable companion, Stella convinces Jeff to call the police to
alert them, and he is distracted from his look-out duties. Lisa starts
looking around the apartment for the jewelry. While he dials the
police at the 6th Precinct, the suicidal woman pauses for a moment
to listen to the composer's music in an adjacent apartment. The large
hulking Thorwald unexpectedly returns just as Lisa seems to have
found some evidence. She proudly holds up some of Mrs. Thorwald's
jewelry in the living room. As she enters the kitchen in his apartment,
she hears Thorwald in the hallway and hides as he enters the front
door. Jeff helplessly and impotently looks on as Lisa is trapped,
gasping and covering his mouth with feminine gestures. Panicked,
he frantically tells the police on the phone about a man molesting
a woman in Thorwald's apartment (while totally forgetting about 'Miss
Lonelyhearts'): "A man is assaulting a woman at 125 West 9th
Street, Second Floor at the rear. Make it fast." [The two dramas
happening only a floor apart increase the unbearable tension - a
depressed 'Miss Lonelyhearts' below, and a trapped Lisa in the wife-murderer's
apartment above.]
In the bedroom, Thorwald notices that the handbag has
been moved. Lisa is spotted and confronted by Lars - she backs away
from him into the living room. She is grabbed by the arm and thrown
down, forced to her knees. Thorwald demands the jewelry back and
then struggles with her and violently shakes her. Jeff anxiously
and helplessly watches in misery as her screams for help can be heard: "Jeff!
Jeff!" As she fends him off and they wrestle with each other,
Lars turns out the lights. When the police arrive in the apartment's
corridor just in time to prevent any serious injury, they question
both Lisa and Thorwald.
In a significant scene as she explains her breaking
and entering crime, Lisa positions herself with her back to the window
between the real criminal and the authorities. To signal that she
has found the ring, she points to Thorwald's wife's wedding ring on
her own finger that she waves behind her back. Stella watches
with binoculars as Jeff views the scene with his telephoto lens.
[Note: Pointing to the wedding ring on her finger,
she courageously reveals that she has discovered the crucial evidence
- it is also an expression of her symbolic wish and proposal to
be married to Jeff. By wearing the ring, she fulfills her own fantasy.
And by daringly placing herself in serious danger and causing him
masochistic excitement at the same time, she inspires Jeff toward
love, commitment, concern, and marriage in multiple ways, as he
watches her through his long telephoto lens.]
While Lisa gestures, Lars notices her signals and the
wedding ring, and triangulates the view, spotting the mortal threat.
He looks up and discovers that Jeff, his tormentor, is watching from
the apartment window across the courtyard, looking directly into
his telephoto lens. It is the first time he has noticed the voyeuristic
spy in the apartment complex - it is a chilling moment in the film
as he sees the threatening spectator and knows where he lives.
When Lisa is led away by police, Stella leaves with
their available cash (of about $250 dollars) to bail her out of jail,
presumably with a charge of first offense burglary. Just then, Tom
Doyle calls, not wanting to be bothered by another
"mad-killer" tale. Jeff whispers the latest developments:
Lisa's arrest after entering Thorwald's apartment and finding the evidence
- Mrs. Thorwald's wedding ring; and Thorwald's killing of a dog that
was digging around in the garden where something was buried. Jeff also
describes his explanations and theories surrounding Thorwald's murder
of his wife:
All those trips at night with that metal suitcase.
He wasn't taking out his possessions, because his possessions were
still up in the apartment...in sections, and I'll tell you something
else. All the telephone calls he made were long-distance. All right,
now if he called his wife long-distance on the day she left, after
she arrived in Meritsville, why did she write a card to him saying
that she'd arrived in Meritsville? Why did she do that?
Doyle promises to "run it down," and get
Lisa out of jail without the need of bail money. He also assures
Jeff about Thorwald: "If that ring checks out, we'll give him
an escort."
In the exciting finale when Jeff is left alone in
his apartment, he notices that Lars' apartment is dark. When his
phone rings again, he doesn't wait to hear who the caller is. He
blurts out:
Tom, I think Thorwald's left. I don't...Hello...
The phone clicks off and disconnects. Jeff slowly realizes
his error - it was not the detective. He sits helplessly, listening
to noises, glancing around warily, wondering if he will potentially
be the next victim - a victim of male aggression like Mrs. Thorwald.
While he hears footsteps outside his apartment, Jeff wheels himself
around to grab his flash equipment and a long box of flashbulbs to
protect himself. Then, he positions himself in front of his rear
window so that he is darkly silhouetted by it. Eventually, the dark
figure of Thorwald slowly opens the door and enters - he guiltily
and pitiably asks:
Thorwald: What do you want from me? Your friend,
the girl, could have turned me in. Why didn't she? What is it you
want? A lot of money? I don't have any money. Say something. Say
something. Tell me what you want! Can you get me that ring back?
Jeff: No!
Thorwald: Tell her to bring it back.
Jeff: I can't. The police have it by now.
Jeff has inserted a flashbulb into his camera's flash
mechanism. To blind Thorwald momentarily as he menacingly moves forward
to attack, on each of the three steps he takes down to reach his
victim, Jeff keeps loading new flashbulbs and firing the flash to
keep the killer at a distance. Jeff fights him off by flashing or
firing his profession's main instrument - his camera and its exploding
flash mechanism [orgasmically or erotically?] - once, twice, three
times, and then a fourth time. Each whitish-blue flash is followed
by a red after-glow filling the entire frame, from Thorwald's dazed
perspective.
Seeing Doyle and Lisa entering Thorwald's apartment
across the way, Jeff screams out: "Lisa. Doyle." Thorwald
struggles with Jeff, trying to strangle him, and then dumps him out
of the wheelchair and through the open window. Jeff hangs and dangles
from the window ledge three floors above the courtyard as Thorwald
tries to push him to his death. Onlookers from the apartments around
the courtyard hear the suspenseful fight - now they are the spectators
looking over at Jeff's window. Detectives grab Lars from behind at
the last minute, but Jeff lets go and falls backward to the ground
below. His fall to the courtyard is partially broken by detectives.
Reunited, Lisa cradles Jeff's head in her lap as he tells her: "I'm
proud of you."
Jeff sarcastically asks Doyle: "You got enough
for a search warrant now?" The police yell down that Thorwald
has confessed that he distributed his wife's body parts in the East
River: "Thorwald's ready to take us on a tour of the East River." With
morbid curiosity, Stella whispers a question to Doyle and learns
that because the dog was "too inquisitive," Thorwald
dug up Mrs. Thorwald's head from the flower bed and moved it
to a hat box in his apartment. Asked if she wants to take a look,
Stella replies: "No thanks, I don't want any part of it."
[Note: A
gruesome double-entendre was about one of Mrs. Thorwald's body parts
- her head? - possibly in the hat box, that causes her to do a double-take]
In the epilogue or final scene, the temperature now
reads 72 degrees and the heat wave has broken. The camera makes a
wide pan one last time around the courtyard [a wide pan both commences
and closes the film in a neatly symmetrical pattern of actions] to
resolve the lives of the occupants of the complex in the framed windows:
- 'Miss Lonelyhearts' (now no-longer-lonely) visits
the composer in his studio, where he plays his new phonograph hit
record release for her (the song that was being composed during
the entire film). She tells him: "I can't tell you what this
music has meant to me." His beautiful music saved her life
and prevented her suicide attempt: "Lisa, with your daffodil
April face, Lisa, full of starry-eyed laughing grace; Hold me and
whisper the sweet words I'm yearning for; Drown me in kisses, Caresses
I'm burning for."
- Painters with paint rollers are busy repainting
the vacated Thorwald apartment.
- The childless couple who sleep on the fire escape
have acquired a new puppy dog to replace their murdered dog. They
lower it in their basket.
- 'Miss Torso' opens her door for Stanley, a chubby,
spectacled, Army-uniformed soldier boyfriend (or husband?) and
true love, returning home and hungry for what's in the refrigerator.
- The sculptress naps in her lawn chair after finishing
her "Hunger" sculpture.
- The newlyweds quarrel for the first time - because
the bridegroom quit his job. The bride is disaffected and furious,
vowing she wouldn't have gotten married if she had known.
Jeff snoozes [in the same position as in the film's
opening] with his back toward his rear window, facing inward and
presumably having given up his indulgent spying on others. There
is a smile on his face. His fate following the cataclysmic discovery
of the murder is that he is doomed to repetition - more helpless
convalescence and more time sitting at his window with two broken
legs in casts (doubly castrated!). But now the camera finds the recklessly-brave,
protective hero Lisa at the side of her flawed fiancee. Her legs
are on the sofa next to him - he is not alone this time.
The shot pans up her legs, revealing significantly
that Lisa is masculinely-dressed in blue jeans/pants and shirt. [She
is not in her typical glamorous, high-fashion outfit - rather, she
is the one 'wearing the trousers.'] After noticing that he is asleep
and not watching her, she casts off her male image by putting down
her adventure tale reading material - Beyond the High Himalayas,
by William O. Douglas. She
assertively substitutes her own preferred reading material - Harper's
Bazaar (the "Beauty Issue"). On the soundtrack is the
musician's song:
"Lisa." The window shades roll down before
the superimposed Paramount Studios logo - the audience members were
the ultimate voyeurs "spying" on
the entire film, before fading to black.
[Note: One thing to note: there were NO end credits
in the original film. The DVD restoration appended end credits, as
well as the PG-rating that was applied to the film decades later.
(There were no film ratings in 1954.)]
|