Meet the cast -- Introduction: Just a little neighborhood murder -- Juggling wolves in Hollywood -- An auteur goes window shopping -- A preview of coming attractions -- Lisa Fremont and the case for feminine intuition -- Surveillance in the air -- I think we have a movie -- Opening night of L.B. Jefferies's last week in a cast -- The cinematic aftermath -- Inching the window open in censored America -- A brave new wave -- Seventies Hollywood through the rearview lens -- The resurrection of Rear Window -- A race of peeping toms -- Hitchcock's legacy on trial -- Holding a mirror to the twenty-first century -- Epilogue: Closing the lens -- Acknowledgments

Before the internet and social media offered voyeuristic glimpses into the lives of others, the acclaimed Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, exposed the dangers and delights of looking--and knowing--too much in his 1954 masterpiece Rear Window. Widely hailed as one of the greatest films ever made, it stars James Stewart and Grace Kelly at the top of their game but, in an unusual gamble, is shot entirely from within a Greenwich Village apartment. Using this limited point of view, Hitchcock forces his audience to participate in his protagonist's voyeuristic impulses and darkest obsessions--a bold move in the era of the Hollywood Blacklist and restrictive Hays Code. But the gamble paid off, and Rear Window became a timeless classic. This book goes straight to the source of Rear Window's genius by mining the original papers of Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart, and Thelma Ritter, revealing little-known facts behind the scenes: Why taking the role of Lisa Fremont was one of the toughest decisions Grace Kelly ever made; How Hitchcock intertwined suspense and romance with inspiration from Ingrid Bergman; How he used a topless scene to distract the censors from other scenes to which they may have objected; and how Hitchcock crafted the film's unforgettable villain, Lars Thorwald, by modeling him on a producer he loathed--the infamous David O. Selznick