Notorious (1946) influences Rear Window (1954)

INFLUENCERS & INSPIRATION

Whereby the influence on set or in the theatre watching someone else’s film, inspires another…

During the filming of Notorious (1946), starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, director Alfred Hitchcock had the opportunity to observe an interesting relationship. Bergman, when in Europe in 1945 following VE Day, met the dashing war photographer, Robert Capa. The two began an intense affair, with Capa following Bergman back to Hollywood and to the set of her next film, Notorious. He agreed, at her urging, to work as the production’s still photographer. It was there that Hitchcock observed this attraction of opposites. Hitchcock became aware that Bergman (who was unhappy in her marriage) desperately wanted Capa to give up his dangerous, globe-trotting ways, marry her and take pictures in Hollywood.

Though opposites attract, can they sustain? Not in this case. The Bergman-Capa affair ended later that same year, in 1946.

However, clearly flummoxed as to how any man could say ‘no’ to Ingrid Bergman, Hitchcock used the Bergman-Capa dynamic as the model for the relationship of the leads in his film Rear Window (1954). Lisa Freemont (Grace Kelly) is a beautiful and gracious fashionista who wants L. B. ‘Jeff’ Jeffries (James Stewart), a globe-trotting photojournalist, to stop putting himself in harm’s way, marry her and take pictures in the fashion world of New York City. But, like Capa, Jeffries’s not interested in such domesticity. However, solving a murder can apparently bring a couple much closer together. And, in the final frames of Rear Window, the audience gets to see just how these two celluloid opposites have figured out a way to make their relationship work. 

Sadly, Rear Window was released the very year that Capa died, killed by a landmine while on assignment in Vietnam.