Through viewing the film Rear Window and reading the Short story It had to be murder I saw various ways in which suspense was created both in the short story and film. In the film, Jeff was trying to work out his problems with Lisa as well as being a voyeur and peeping into his neighbor's rear windows. He mainly focuses on Thorwald's window but we have several scenes where Jeff addresses his problems with Lisa. The most climatic scenes happened towards the end of the movie when Lisa decided to enter Thorwald’s apartment without Jeff's approval. While the plot is very similar in the short story, we didn’t have a Lisa in that version so the plot was completely centered around Thorwald and Jeff’s obsession on solving the murder. One of the highest climactic …show more content…
The interruptions with Lisa took us away from the main focal point of the film, which was proving that Thorwald murdered his wife. There were a few scenes throughout the film where Jeff would explain what he saw to Lisa who would change the subject to their issues distracting us from Thorwald. An example is when Lisa came over to spend the night with Jeff but was focused on solving the murder. Lisa got very angry with Jeff for not giving her enough attention which turned into a huge argument taking us away from Thorwald. We also had more focus on the other apartments than there was in the story but, the focus on the other apartments was to give us a visual of Jeff and Lisa’s problems rather than actually corresponding to the murder. Due to these slight interruptions, the points of high suspense were reduced throughout the film while we had continuous suspense in the short story. The film, like the short story, was portrayed from a limited setting but many people wouldn't expect this from a movie so, it may have seemed more like a play rather than an actual