Movie of the Week: The Scene Where Doyle Returns in REAR WINDOW (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

A fascinating, under-discussed moment in one of the most over-analyzed movies ever

I’m not quite sure when I first saw Rear Window. Hitchcock is big in my family, and my childhood memories are strewn with fragments of this, North By Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960). (I think I even saw 1972’s Frenzy on TV when I was about seven, which, yikes. Explains a lot.) Anyway, I’m not going to waste energy writing about Rear Window in some significant way. But on my umpteenth viewing a few days ago, I was struck by the scene in which the skeptical detective Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey) returns to Jeff’s (Jimmy Stewart) apartment. This is after Lisa (Grace Kelly) has fully locked in to the Thorwald affair — an act which is really a proxy for her devotion to Jeff — and prior to Doyle’s arrival, she’d come over with the intention of spending the night. When Doyle gets there she’s in the kitchen making drinks, and he hears her humming a tune offscreen. He then clocks her silk sleepwear peeking out of a briefcase and puts two and two together. But at this stage, before Doyle actually meets Lisa, you can see worry in his eyes — as if he’s realized that Jeff could be on to something. He asks Jeff, seemingly with an open mind, “What else do you have on this Thorwald?” His entire demeanor changes, however, when Lisa enters with the face of Grace Kelly. Doyle stares at her. And stares some more. Not your typical look of admiration, but one of borderline salivation. You can feel him developing a case of acute sexual jealousy in real time: “Careful, Tom,” Jeff warns when he catches Doyle looking at Lisa’s sleepwear again. It’s then that Doyle turns cold and dismissive. As Lisa begins to chime in about Thorwald, Doyle strolls over to gaze out the Rear Window at those famous apartments across the way. In extreme close-up, we have a sense of Doyle’s intense private thoughts leading to a decision: I can’t stand that this old friend of mine is with such a beautiful woman, so I’m going to deny them both the satisfaction they crave, no matter how promising their evidence is. He rubbishes Lisa’s “feminine intuition” as Jeff, so sure that Doyle knew something they didn’t, sputters incredulously. Mission accomplished. In a movie mentioned in Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” as a prime example of the “male gaze,” this is perhaps the scene that most exemplifies it.

Streaming on the Criterion Channel; available to rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and other major platforms.