Rear Window Cunning and Cleverness

Cleverness in this movie is often defined by making intuitive leaps instead of drawing direct connections. At its most extreme, it's just a feeling or instinct, as with Stella's "nose for trouble."

Good questions. These are the kinds of challenges that help to rule out alternative explanations, eliminating other ideas of what might have happened until the only conclusion is murder.

A lot of the dialogue in this part of the movie involves putting two and two together, watching Jeff and Lisa slowly figure out what's going on. In terms of filmmaking, it follows an important rule: show, don't tell. We see how smart Jeff and Lisa are from the way they connect the dots.

Doyle responds to Jeff's deductions with thorough fact-finding. Does this mean he's not as smart as they are? Doyle knows that murdering a wife is a pretty rare event, so he's probably working from a different set of assumptions. Plus, he hasn't been staring out the window for three days.

There are a fair number of lines like this in the film, as Jeff and his friends speculate on how Thorwald did the deed. They're weirdly admiring him in a way, commenting on Thorwald's cleverness at solving some fairly inconvenient issues (like how to get rid of a body). It makes the mystery even more irresistible to them since they're dealing with a criminal who's really thought things through.

Jeff uses his powers of observation here to note a small discrepancy in the layout of the flower bed: he's picking up on the tiniest of clues thanks to his obsessive looking and his visual skills honed as a photographer. Jeff is used to looking at photos and picking up on little details that no one else would.

Once they're sure that Thorwald is guilty, Jeff and Lisa have some leverage they can use to seal his doom. Case in point: threatening to expose him unless he leaves the apartment … which, of course, allows them to sneak in and really put those Scooby-Doo vibes to good use.

In this case, cleverness means looking at the big picture. Lisa is not worried about the cops because she's sure Thorwald did it—and more importantly, she has Mrs. Thorwald's wedding ring, which should exonerate her. Five years later, a Hitchcock character uses a similar tactic to get out of trouble. In North by Northwest, Cary Grant's character is trapped at an auction with some guys who've been trying to kill him. He starts making a disruptive scene and acting like a total bozo so that the auctioneer calls the police to remove him from the room—which is exactly what he wanted, natch.

Ah, the days before caller I.D. Thorwald nails Jeff here because Jeff assumes that Thorwald would never call him. He's been so successful so far that he forgets his quarry can be cagey, too.

Jeff may be being a little too clever here. There's no reason for Thorwald to leave him alive since Jeff has procured the evidence he needs. By now, Thorwald is flipping out and loses his ability to think clearly. He should have known that by tossing Jeff out the window, the cops would be all over him. But maybe he's realized that he's been found out, and the best thing to do is to kill the guy who figured it out.