Hitchcock's Music by Sullivan Jack

Author:Sullivan, Jack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2006-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Rear Window. Hitchcock directing his songwriter.

Thanks to Miss Torso, the film also takes on elements of ballet, a form that acts as a metaphor in dancelike movies such as Foreign Correspondent, North by Northwest, and Topaz, but here becomes more literal. Under Jeff’s happy gaze, she dances to Waxman’s Rhumba and his bustling, neoclassical “New Ballet,” to Bernstein’s Fancy Free, and to Schubert’s Rosamunde. These are some of the wittiest moments in the film, foils for Stella’s and Doyle’s withering commentary on Jeff’s voyeurism. Miss Torso’s funniest turn is saved for the end, when she whirls to the door, opens it, and joyfully leaps on Stanley, her soldier boyfriend, a nerdy little guy with glasses, about half her height, who has returned at last.

Often, Rear Window feels less like a single musical than an anthology. Songs by many composers glide through Jeff’s window, each making its contribution to the action and atmosphere. Critics assert that the songs, unlike those in realist cinema, correspond with what is shown on the screen. Sometimes this is indeed the case, as in the playful version of “That’s Amore” jangling loudly as Jeff watches a new bride being carried across the threshold (Hitchcock ruled out using a wedding march); or when Lisa’s song appears during the revelatory moment when she sees Thorwald putting a heavy rope on a trunk (the beginning of her transformation from Fashion Queen into Girl Friday); or when the piano boogie concludes at exactly the moment Doyle declares, “Lars Thorwald is no more a murderer than I am,” seeming to shut down Jeff and Lisa’s detective-voyeurism game.17 The most precise synchronization is the drooping of “Lisa” into a minor-key cadence when Lisa’s face caves in following Jeff’s sarcastic remark about her lobster dinner: “It’s perfect, Lisa, as always.”

The most dramatic correspondence between music and action occurs when Miss Lonely Hearts puts “To See You Is to Love You” on the phonograph, poignantly constructing a dinner date with a fantasy partner. This Johnny Burke-James Van Heusen ballad plays on with wistful string accompaniment as she raises her drink to toast an invisible love: “I see you everywhere,” continues the song, “in the same old dream tonight.” Movies are a controlled dream, but this is the same old dream, an unending melodrama of unfulfilled fantasy blurred by alcohol. In one of the film’s most touching moments, Jeff twice toasts her from across the way as she toasts her fantasy date. A similarly sad motto for Miss Lonely Hearts is Waxman’s “Many Dreams Ago,” which plays during her pickup journey to the restaurant across the street.

Sometimes the correspondences seem clear, then suddenly blur. “To See You Is To Love You” aptly enhances Miss Lonely Hearts’s imaginary date, but when a string variation continues as Miss Torso performs what Lisa calls “a woman’s hardest job, juggling wolves,” the tune seems suddenly ironic; playing on as Thorwald enters his wife’s bedroom, it becomes bitterly so. Schubert’s stately Rosamund e accompanies Miss Torso’s most lyrical ballet but continues to pour in the window during the caustic argument between Jeff and Doyle.

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