The MacGuffin: News and Comment (20/Jan/2004)
(c) Ken Mogg (2004)
January 20
Last night I emailed a friend who knows the critic Robin Wood. Mentioning the 'argument by citing authority-figures' which I described here last night - and which I think is a slight to the critical tradition in which Wood is an exemplary figure - I said: 'I do miss Robin whose every point is an actual insight - or at least strives to be - and who really does provide a developing argument [not just a construction of citations!] to give an additional, broader sense of intelligence at work. Robin would be ashamed unless he rendered each piece of information into something meaningful, in fairly empirical terms. No?' Well, the good news is that Wood's monograph for the BFI on Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959) has just appeared. Now, back to where I left off last night. And first, here's a piece of information from critic Bill Krohn that - very properly - calls Rear Window Hitchcock's most 'spatial' film, something which no-one would quarrel with, I take it. Also, the rest of what Bill reports fits nicely, I think, with what I've just said about 'actual insights'. Bill writes: 'Manhandled (1924), an Alan Dwan film with Gloria Swanson, contains two scenes anticipating Rear Window: Swanson and her marriage-shy beau look at the people across the way (window to window - not a multi-window setup) and see people quarrelling. This is followed by his departure from her life, which triggers the film. When he returns and proposes, they see a happy couple across the way. Dwan's cinema is very geometric (cf. my "Senses of Cinema" website article on him), and in Manhandled he anticipated - or helped inspire - Hitchcock's most "spatial" film.' Thanks, Bill. Dwan's film was made for Paramount, where Rear Window was filmed, making a direct influence that much more likely. (Which reminds me ... In 'The MacGuffin', I once suggested that Byron Haskin's The Naked Jungle, being made at Paramount at practically the same time as Rear Window, may have been another influence. In both films, a man seems strangely reluctant to consummate a relationship with a beautiful woman until external events bring matters to a head.) Coming back now to the 'spatial' aspect of Hitchcock's film, and to get away from purely 'literary' readings of it (cf. last night's item), I wonder as follows. What sort of feelings do we attach to the fact that Thorwald eventually visits Jeff's very apartment to wreak his wrath on his tormentor (Rear Window is another Hitchcock film with at least one scene of near-sadism), and in particular the fact that Thorwald enters from the reverse direction to which Jeff so far has been directing most of his attention? I'll try and answer that question tomorrow.
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