Case Studies of Film Adaptation
text: "Rear Window" (Woolrich, 1942)
This adaptation serves as basis for questioning the popular opinion that the quality of the written work always surpasses that of the filmic version. The voyeuristic subject matter of Rear Window lends inteself to a visual format, and Hitchcock himself admits in the assigned article that "of all the films I have made, this to me is the most cinematic." While Woolrich's short story is entertaining, Hitchcock's film is masterful.
The story consists of the protagonist, L.B. Jeffries, observing his neighbors while he remains confined to his apartment due to a broken leg. As Jeffries develops suspicions of murder, Woolrich selects language that reflects his fear. Short, choppy sentences of Jeffries' first person desicriptions convey a sense of reading a play instead of a story: "He withdrew into the room again, and it blacked out. His figure passed into the one that was still lighted next to it, the living room. That blacked next."
Hitchcock uses the camera to demonstrate, rather than describe, what Jeffries witnesses. Film viewers see no more than the invalid; we must squint at distant shots of other apartments from Jeffries' vantage. The movie thus largely preserves a first person perspective by directly approximating what Jeffries experiences, using a camera instead of words.
Hitchcock amplifies the peeping Tom theme, adding a particularly effective scene in which Jeffries' detective friend suspects, based on his observations, that Jeffries' lady friend is spending the night. This parallel implicates Jeffries as one of the watched as well as a watcher. Thus, the film develops the irony of Jeffries watching others' lives, because in effect, the viewer spies on him while he is spying on his neighbors. These multiple layers of meaning are not present in the brief story.
SECONDARY SOURCES:
Internet
Movie Database Site
Alfred Hitchcock, "Rear Window,"
Focus on Hitchcock, ed. Albert J. La Valley (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1972) 40-46.
This article by Alfred Hitchcock informs students of the
director's assessment of his work's relationship to novels, stories, and plays. He
explains the cinematic equivalents of literary techniques of building suspense, and he
discusses in detail the assets of a pictorial approach.
Part of Northern Virginia Community College's Dogwood Project.
This page is copyright © 2000, Bridget Robin Pool.
Last Modified Monday, January 29, 2001