Well, if possible, both
2024-03-20 19:59The funny thing about Detective Lieutenant Thomas J. Doyle of the NYPD is not that he was my undoubted introduction to Wendell Corey. The funny thing is that I didn't remember him for years. He should have been too weird to mislay.
To the child I was the first time I saw Rear Window (1954), he didn't look weird at all. He looked rational, which in my passionate identification with the terror and unfairness of not being believed I tuned out except as a stumbling block in the struggle of James Stewart's L. B. Jeffries to convince anyone with the slightest authority or even interest that murder had been committed one thunderous night across the courtyard of his summer-broiled block of Greenwich Village. Especially since his suspicions sat so well with the elegantly tenacious investigations of Grace Kelly's Lisa Fremont and the earthier opinions of Thelma Ritter's Stella, it never occurred to me that Jeff could be wrong—a stir-crazy shutterbug climbing with the heat wave into a fantasy as far-fetched as any of the globe-trotting adventures from which his plaster-cased leg has laid him up for six stultifying weeks. I was in the habit of taking narrators at their word. The relevance of Doyle was his failure to believe the hero, all the more infuriatingly because of the friendliness with which he appeared to hear out and then brush off each new hint of evidence. Whatever else he revealed about himself in the process of fulfilling his obstructive function did not stick with me.
As an adult, the first thing I can see about Doyle—beyond the Technicolor-saturated shock-blue of his eyes, so effective in low-lit scenes where they seem as luminous as Kelly's or Stewart's for that matter—is the deck stacked generically against him. Not only does he represent the law in a story of amateur detection, he's the conduit of sensible, skeptical objections in a film that started as one of the nightmare fictions of Cornell Woolrich, however wittily the screenplay by John Michael Hayes situates it within a snapshot of mid-century lives in New York. He's a sharp dresser, a second-nature kibitzer, and we understand him to have been a skilled reconnaissance pilot during WWII, but it would be a miracle of literary protocols were he to be right that the disappearance of one of the courtyard's residents is the result of a normal marital split rather than the kind which involves dismemberment. He's not a stopped clock, nonetheless. However sarcastically he explains it to Jeff, he's ethically as well as pragmatically right in refusing to search a citizen's apartment without a warrant in hopes of finding the evidence to justify one: "At the risk of sounding stuffy, I'd like to remind you of the Constitution . . . They'd throw the New York State Penal Code right in my face and it's six volumes." Challenged as to whether he can explain the mysterious movements of the murderer-elect, he retorts easily, "No; neither can you. That's a secret, private world you're looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn't possibly explain in public." On one of its numerous levels, as densely stratified as the infrastructure and architecture of the city it miniaturizes, the film turns on this question of whether Jeff has the right to breach the understood contract of urban living whereby neighbors exist cheek by jowl without getting into one another's business such as is constantly on display this very hot summer when everyone lives with their windows open and their shades up when not actually sleeping out on the fire escape, not alienated from one another like the myth of Kitty Genovese which seems to get its first airing in the accusations which follow the killing of a beloved small dog, but coexisting in the communal pretense of privacy from which Jeff shaving in his pajamas benefits as much as the dancer across the way who starts her exercises in the morning without putting her top on. To his mind, what he has seen through the windows of the Thorwald apartment entitles him to interfere; Doyle disagrees and the film really settles the question only with its second-story denouement in which all sorts of barriers real and imagined are broken, some literally and some ironically and some sweetly most of all. Until then, surely it must be baiting the audience when it reserves the possibility that the cynically experienced cop may have the truth of the situation, especially when he's such a horse's ass about it. "It'll wear off—along with the hallucinations."
Hitchcock prided himself on disconnecting audience sympathy from moral alignment and while Rear Window does not push the proposition as far as something like Psycho (1960) or Vertigo (1958) or even Notorious (1946), it's clever of the film to assign its most reasonable arguments to a character who is hardly a model of reason. However unreliable the photojournalist could turn out to be in his mix of neighborly obsession and nail-biting boredom, Doyle's even less the cool, disinterested observer than Jeff—breezily susceptible, conservatively stubborn, such an incorrigible wisenheimer that even a deserved and icy dismissal can't deter him from getting in the last word. His expert opinion entails a remarkable amount of hanging out at the expense of his old friend's liquor cabinet, occasionally losing the drift of the conversation to the terpsichorean scanties of "Miss Torso." His bland glance at an overnight case spilling over with peach-silky lingerie cogently underscores his point about private worlds, but a leapfrog of logic from Jeff nonplusses him into an incredible, Leo Rosten-ish "Hanh?" The night he intends to close the non-case of Lars Thorwald is a magnificent exposition of failing to read the room with needless cracks about feminine intuition and too obvious an impatience with armchair sleuths until the audience in solidarity with Jeff and Lisa hardens against his entirely plausible interpretation of events. He looks like a sophisticate in his summer suits and his cavalier gesture of trying to toss back a snifter of brandy like a shot leaves him mopping it off his lapels with a self-conscious grin that finds no more purchase on his unamused audience than his genial condescension of the moment before. However Corey landed the role—he had demonstrated a convincing rapport with Stewart in the otherwise inert Carbine Williams (1952)—it could have been tailored to his quick, wry, fallible repertoire, right down to the part where even after Doyle comes through in the crunch, only the authenticity of his concern for a man he's spent most of his screentime gently deriding keeps him from looking like a complete bozo. Jeff, of course, has his own amends to make for failing to see what's in front of him whether through the safely cropped distance of a telephoto lens or his own assumption-blinkered eyes: "Boy, you should've seen her!" Heroically in heels on the fire escape, flashing another woman's ring like a high sign behind her back, Lisa I remembered seeing. Jeff I remembered, too, across the decades he and his story took to come into focus. Doyle, frankly, fucks up so hard, I don't know what my excuse was.
If family memory can be trusted, I really did see Rear Window for the first time following its spoof on Square One TV (1987–92) as Mathnet's "A View from the Rear Terrace" (1988). I rewatched it courtesy of the Minuteman Library Network, but on account of being one of its director's most famous and well-loved productions, it is readily available wherever movies are sold, streamed, or pirated. Happy birthday, Wendell Corey, one hundred and ten years ago. Being forgotten from a formative age feels unfair to every single one of your characters I have met. I'm still yelling at the next dry stone wall I see in the Pioneer Valley on your account. This hallucination brought to you by my secret backers at Patreon.
To the child I was the first time I saw Rear Window (1954), he didn't look weird at all. He looked rational, which in my passionate identification with the terror and unfairness of not being believed I tuned out except as a stumbling block in the struggle of James Stewart's L. B. Jeffries to convince anyone with the slightest authority or even interest that murder had been committed one thunderous night across the courtyard of his summer-broiled block of Greenwich Village. Especially since his suspicions sat so well with the elegantly tenacious investigations of Grace Kelly's Lisa Fremont and the earthier opinions of Thelma Ritter's Stella, it never occurred to me that Jeff could be wrong—a stir-crazy shutterbug climbing with the heat wave into a fantasy as far-fetched as any of the globe-trotting adventures from which his plaster-cased leg has laid him up for six stultifying weeks. I was in the habit of taking narrators at their word. The relevance of Doyle was his failure to believe the hero, all the more infuriatingly because of the friendliness with which he appeared to hear out and then brush off each new hint of evidence. Whatever else he revealed about himself in the process of fulfilling his obstructive function did not stick with me.
As an adult, the first thing I can see about Doyle—beyond the Technicolor-saturated shock-blue of his eyes, so effective in low-lit scenes where they seem as luminous as Kelly's or Stewart's for that matter—is the deck stacked generically against him. Not only does he represent the law in a story of amateur detection, he's the conduit of sensible, skeptical objections in a film that started as one of the nightmare fictions of Cornell Woolrich, however wittily the screenplay by John Michael Hayes situates it within a snapshot of mid-century lives in New York. He's a sharp dresser, a second-nature kibitzer, and we understand him to have been a skilled reconnaissance pilot during WWII, but it would be a miracle of literary protocols were he to be right that the disappearance of one of the courtyard's residents is the result of a normal marital split rather than the kind which involves dismemberment. He's not a stopped clock, nonetheless. However sarcastically he explains it to Jeff, he's ethically as well as pragmatically right in refusing to search a citizen's apartment without a warrant in hopes of finding the evidence to justify one: "At the risk of sounding stuffy, I'd like to remind you of the Constitution . . . They'd throw the New York State Penal Code right in my face and it's six volumes." Challenged as to whether he can explain the mysterious movements of the murderer-elect, he retorts easily, "No; neither can you. That's a secret, private world you're looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn't possibly explain in public." On one of its numerous levels, as densely stratified as the infrastructure and architecture of the city it miniaturizes, the film turns on this question of whether Jeff has the right to breach the understood contract of urban living whereby neighbors exist cheek by jowl without getting into one another's business such as is constantly on display this very hot summer when everyone lives with their windows open and their shades up when not actually sleeping out on the fire escape, not alienated from one another like the myth of Kitty Genovese which seems to get its first airing in the accusations which follow the killing of a beloved small dog, but coexisting in the communal pretense of privacy from which Jeff shaving in his pajamas benefits as much as the dancer across the way who starts her exercises in the morning without putting her top on. To his mind, what he has seen through the windows of the Thorwald apartment entitles him to interfere; Doyle disagrees and the film really settles the question only with its second-story denouement in which all sorts of barriers real and imagined are broken, some literally and some ironically and some sweetly most of all. Until then, surely it must be baiting the audience when it reserves the possibility that the cynically experienced cop may have the truth of the situation, especially when he's such a horse's ass about it. "It'll wear off—along with the hallucinations."
Hitchcock prided himself on disconnecting audience sympathy from moral alignment and while Rear Window does not push the proposition as far as something like Psycho (1960) or Vertigo (1958) or even Notorious (1946), it's clever of the film to assign its most reasonable arguments to a character who is hardly a model of reason. However unreliable the photojournalist could turn out to be in his mix of neighborly obsession and nail-biting boredom, Doyle's even less the cool, disinterested observer than Jeff—breezily susceptible, conservatively stubborn, such an incorrigible wisenheimer that even a deserved and icy dismissal can't deter him from getting in the last word. His expert opinion entails a remarkable amount of hanging out at the expense of his old friend's liquor cabinet, occasionally losing the drift of the conversation to the terpsichorean scanties of "Miss Torso." His bland glance at an overnight case spilling over with peach-silky lingerie cogently underscores his point about private worlds, but a leapfrog of logic from Jeff nonplusses him into an incredible, Leo Rosten-ish "Hanh?" The night he intends to close the non-case of Lars Thorwald is a magnificent exposition of failing to read the room with needless cracks about feminine intuition and too obvious an impatience with armchair sleuths until the audience in solidarity with Jeff and Lisa hardens against his entirely plausible interpretation of events. He looks like a sophisticate in his summer suits and his cavalier gesture of trying to toss back a snifter of brandy like a shot leaves him mopping it off his lapels with a self-conscious grin that finds no more purchase on his unamused audience than his genial condescension of the moment before. However Corey landed the role—he had demonstrated a convincing rapport with Stewart in the otherwise inert Carbine Williams (1952)—it could have been tailored to his quick, wry, fallible repertoire, right down to the part where even after Doyle comes through in the crunch, only the authenticity of his concern for a man he's spent most of his screentime gently deriding keeps him from looking like a complete bozo. Jeff, of course, has his own amends to make for failing to see what's in front of him whether through the safely cropped distance of a telephoto lens or his own assumption-blinkered eyes: "Boy, you should've seen her!" Heroically in heels on the fire escape, flashing another woman's ring like a high sign behind her back, Lisa I remembered seeing. Jeff I remembered, too, across the decades he and his story took to come into focus. Doyle, frankly, fucks up so hard, I don't know what my excuse was.
If family memory can be trusted, I really did see Rear Window for the first time following its spoof on Square One TV (1987–92) as Mathnet's "A View from the Rear Terrace" (1988). I rewatched it courtesy of the Minuteman Library Network, but on account of being one of its director's most famous and well-loved productions, it is readily available wherever movies are sold, streamed, or pirated. Happy birthday, Wendell Corey, one hundred and ten years ago. Being forgotten from a formative age feels unfair to every single one of your characters I have met. I'm still yelling at the next dry stone wall I see in the Pioneer Valley on your account. This hallucination brought to you by my secret backers at Patreon.
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