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Thorwald's Use Of Suspense In The Rear Window

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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

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The movie did have most of the characteristics in the short story correct with only a few differences therefore it is a good adaptation of the story. It’s understandable that the movie added more scenes because the director might have wanted it to be more interesting rather than just have it exactly like the short story. In addition, a cliffhanger in a movie that is not part of a series would be very annoying. Nevertheless, the short story is better than the movie because the reader can read the descriptions of certain characters and are able to hear their thoughts. For example, the story says, “June is a secretary in the high school Connie attended, and if that wasn’t bad enough, she was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time by her mother and her mother’s sisters” (Oates 324).

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