What Inspired “Rear Window’s” Story?
Rear Window (1954) is a superb piece of American screenwriting, but the source of its inspiration is twofold. Primarily, it is a re-telling of Cornell Woolrich’s 1942 short story, It Had to Be Murder. The short story is a simplistic Rear Window, telling roughly the same story with less characters. It Had to Be Murder was one of the first stories Woolrich penned after turning his literary work to pulp and detective fiction.
Second, Rear Window cites reference to two real-world crimes: one of the Crumbles murders that took place in the early 1920s, specifically the 1924 case of Patrick Mahon, an Englishman who murdered and dismembered his mistress. Second is the case of Dr. Crippen. In the Mahon case, the prenant mistress’s body was discovered in over 40 different bits, primarily scattered about Mahon’s home. Many reports also indicate he threw bits of her body from the window of a moving train, but kept the head.
In the Crippen case, “Dr. Crippen poisoned his wife, Cora, by giving her a lethal dose of hyoscin. He then cut up the corpse, burned and buried the remains in the basement of his home, and went about concealing his crime by writing several letters to his wife’s friends explaining that she had gone to America. During the next few months, Dr. Crippen pawned several pieces of his wife’s jewelry, and was frequently seen in the company of his mistress, Ethel Le Neve. When the police became suspicious, Crippen left his home, prompting a thorough search of the house, where human remains were discovered beneath the bricks of the coal cellar.”
Hitchcock said, “The killing presented something of a problem, so I used two news stories from the British press. One was the Patrick Mahon case and the other was the case of Dr. Crippen. In the Mahon case the man killed a girl in a bungalow on the seafront of Southern England. He cut up the body and threw it, piece by piece, out of a train window. But he didn’t know what to do with the head, and that’s where I got the idea of having them look for the victim’s head in Rear Window.”