Rear Window

Men, are you over 40?

When you wake up in the morning, do you feel tired and rundown?

Do you have that listless feeling?

Jefferies.

Congratulations, Jeff.

For what?

For getting rid of that cast.

Who said I was getting rid of it?

This is Wednesday.

Seven weeks from the day you broke your leg. Yes or no?

Gunnison, how did you ever get to be such a big editor with such a small memory?

Thrift, industry and hard work.

And catching the publisher with his secretary.

Did I get the wrong day?

No.

No, wrong week.

Next Wednesday I emerge from this plaster cocoon.

That's too bad, Jeff.

Well, I guess I can't be lucky every day.

Forget I called.

Yeah, I sure feel sorry for you, Gunnison.

Must be rough on you thinking of me wearing this cast for another whole week.

That one week is gonna cost me my best photographer

and you a big assignment.

Where?

There's no point in even talking about it.

Oh, come on, come on. Where?

Kashmir.

Got a code tip from the bureau chief this morning.

The place is about to go up in smoke.

What did I tell you? Didn't I tell you that's the next place to watch?

You did.

Okay. When do I leave? Half-hour? Hour?

With that cast on? You don't.

Oh, stop sounding stuffy.

I can take pictures from a jeep or a water buffalo, if necessary.

You're too valuable to the magazine for us to play around with.

I'll send Morgan or Lambert.

Morgan or Lambert. That's fine.

I get myself half-killed for you,

and you reward me by stealing my assignments.

I didn't ask you to stand in the middle of that automobile racetrack.

You asked for something dramatically different. You got it.

So did you. Goodbye, Jeff.

Now wait a minute, Gunnison. You've got to get me out of here.

Six weeks sitting in a two-room apartment

with nothing to do but look out the window at the neighbors.

Bye, Jeff.

No, Gunnison, I...

If you don't pull me out of this swamp of boredom,

I'm gonna do something drastic.

Like what?

"Like what"? I'm gonna get married.

And then I'll never be able to go anywhere.

It's about time you got married,

before you turn into a lonesome and bitter old man.

Yeah, can't you just see me?

Rushing home to a hot apartment

to listen to the automatic laundry and the electric dishwasher

and the garbage disposal and the nagging wife.

Jeff, wives don't nag anymore, they discuss.

Is that so? Is that so?

Well, maybe in the high-rent district they discuss.

In my neighborhood, they still nag.

Yeah? Well, you know best. I'll call you later, Jeff.

Yeah, have some good news the next time, huh?

Good morning. I said, "Good morning"!

Oh, good morning.

Say, I wouldn't dig so deep if I were you.

You're giving them far too much water.

Why don't you shut up?

Well!

I do declare.

New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse.

Oh, hello, Stella.

And they got no windows in the workhouse.

You know, in the old days, they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker.

Any of those bikini bombshells you're always watching worth a red-hot poker?

Oh, dear. We've become a race of Peeping Toms.

What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.

Yes, sir.

How's that for a bit of homespun philosophy?

Reader's Digest, April, 1939.

- Well, I only quote from the best. - Yeah.

You don't have to take my temperature this morning.

Quiet. See if you can break 100.

You know, I should have been a gypsy fortune-teller

instead of an insurance-company nurse.

I got a nose for trouble. Can smell it ten miles away.

You heard of that market crash in '29? I predicted that.

Just how did you do that, Stella?

Oh, simple.

I was nursing a director of General Motors.

"Kidney ailment," they said. "Nerves," I said.

Then I asked myself, "What's General Motors got to be nervous about?"

"Overproduction", I says. "Collapse".

When General Motors has to go to the bathroom 10 times a day,

the whole country's ready to let go.

You know, Stella, in economics,

a kidney ailment has no relationship to the stock market.

None whatsoever.

Crashed, didn't it?

I can smell trouble right here in this apartment.

First you smash your leg, then you get to looking out the window,

see things you shouldn't see. Trouble.

I can see you in court now,

surrounded by a bunch of lawyers in double-breasted suits.

You're pleading. You say, "Judge, it was only a little bit of innocent fun."

"I love my neighbors, like a father."

And the judge says, "Well, congratulations."

"You've just given birth to three years in Dannemora."

Right now I'd welcome trouble, you know.

You've got a hormone deficiency.

How can you tell from a thermometer?

Those bathing beauties you've been watching

haven't raised your temperature one degree in a month.

Here we go.

One more week.

No, I think you're right. I think there is gonna be trouble around here.

I knew it.

Ooh!

Do you ever heat that stuff?

Gives your circulation something to fight.

Oh, I see.

What kind of trouble?

Lisa Fremont.

You kidding?

She's a beautiful young girl, and you're a reasonably healthy young man.

She expects me to marry her.

That's normal.

I don't want to.

That's abnormal.

I just... I'm not ready for marriage.

Every man's ready for marriage when the right girl comes along.

And Lisa Fremont is the right girl for any man with half a brain

who can get one eye open.

She's all right.

- What'd you do, have a fight? - No.

Father loading up the shotgun?

What?

Please, Stella.

It's happened before, you know.

Some of the world's happiest marriages

have started "under the gun", as you might say.

No, she's just not the girl for me.

Yeah, she's only perfect.

She's too perfect. She's too talented. She's too beautiful. She's too sophisticated.

She's too everything but what I want.

Is what you want something you can discuss?

What? It's very simple, Stella.

She belongs to that rarefied atmosphere of Park Avenue, you know.

Expensive restaurants and literary cocktail parties.

People with sense belong wherever they're put.

Can you imagine her traveling around the world with a camera bum

who never has more than a week's salary in the bank?

If she was only ordinary.

You never gonna get married?

I'll probably get married one of these days,

but when I do, it's gonna be to someone who thinks of life

not just as a new dress and a lobster dinner

or latest scandal.

I need a woman who's willing to... Hold it.

Who's willing to go anywhere and do anything and love it.

So the honest thing for me to do is just call the whole thing off.

Let her find somebody else.

Yeah, I can hear you now.

"Get out of my life, you perfectly wonderful woman."

"You're too good for me."

Look, Mr. Jefferies, I'm not an educated woman,

but I can tell you one thing.

When a man and a woman see each other and like each other,

they ought to come together, wham, like a couple of taxis on Broadway,

and not sit around analyzing each other like two specimens in a bottle.

There's an intelligent way to approach marriage.

Intelligence.

Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence.

Modern marriage.

No, we've progressed emotionally.

Baloney.

Once it was, "See somebody, get excited, get married."

Now it's, "Read a lot of books, fence with a lot of four-syllable words",

"psychoanalyze each other"

"until you can't tell the difference between"

"a petting party and a civil service exam."

People have different emotional levels...

When I married Myles, we were both a couple of maladjusted misfits.

We are still maladjusted misfits, and we have loved every minute of it.

Well, that's fine, Stella.

Now, would you fix me a sandwich, please?

Yes, I will.

And I'll spread a little common sense on the bread.

Lisa's loaded to her fingertips with love for you.

I got two words of advice for you. Marry her.

She pay you much?

Oh!

There.

- Here's the key. - Thank you.

Well, if you want anything, just ring.

Honey. Come on.

Got to carry you over the threshold.