PRE-SCREENING BACKGROUND QUESTIONS (CONTEXT EXPLORATION)

Briefly describe what your expectations for the film were?
I’ve seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 mystery thriller Rear Window countless times, both at home and fortunately on the big screen. Alongside Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, It’s one of my favourite films, and for my latest screening of Rear Window I was curious as to how the film’s characters in the confines of their small New York City apartments (as voyeuristically observed from the apartment of the film’s protagonist) reflected on the the emptiness, isolation, and loneliness people feel.
What did you already know about the film and from what source?
From watching the opening credits it’s revealed that Rear Window is a film based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich. Literary agent, writer, editor, and general book, film/TV, and pop culture enthusiast Jacklyn Saferstein-Hansen of Renaissance Literary & Talent notes in her introduction to the 2022 collection Woolrich stories published by Villa Romana Books how Woolrich’s 1942 novella was originally published by the pulp magazine Dime Detective under the title It Had to be Murder (Saferstein-Hansen 9). Saferstein-Hansen also explains how the name Rear Window was chosen when the story was published in the 1944 fiction collection titled After-Dinner Story, the name that stuck for that and all future publications of Woolrich’s tale (9).