The Hitchcock Genius
...to other Alfred Hitchcock films
Based on the 1942 short story It Had to Be Murder by Cornell Woolrich, the film Rear Window (1954) which earned director Alfred Hitchcock his fourth Best Director Oscar Nomination, stands today one of his most impressively ‘cinematic’ suspense films. Dramatically different, the masterpiece of Hitchcock’s construction of Rear Window comes together through the technical brilliance, the ability to tell a story in a uniquely captivating way using realistic conventions and the fact that Hitchcock took keen interest in every aspect of production (even wardrobe) fulfilling all of and more than his responsibilities as a director. This is in large part influenced by ‘Hitchcock’s genius’ (vision) as well as input from other members of the creative personnel which included screenwriter John Michael Hayes, cinematographer Robert Burks, editor George Tomasini, music by Franz Waxman and costume designer Edith Head.
It Had to Be Murder presented the riveting story of a man immobilized in his apartment, observing the minutiae of life and death through his rear window. The plot-driven short story was transformed by Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes into a character driven movie. Differences are existent between text and film due to the limitations and advantages of the different media, yet Hitchcock has done more than just translate a word-based story to a visual movie. This they (Hitchcock and Hayes) accomplished by integrating into the movie a host of major and minor characters and an abundance of themes that were either absent from the Woolrich story or barely hinted at, while at the same time keeping the story's plot structure almost exactly as Woolrich had put it together. The measure of Hitchcock's genius is that the fusion of new and genuinely ‘Woolrichian’ elements produced not a patchwork but a beautifully unified...
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