Rear Window
1954
Stella: When two people love each other, they come together - WHAM - like two taxis on Broadway.
Lisa: How's your leg? Jeff: Hurts a little. Lisa: Your stomach? Jeff: Empty as a football. Lisa: And your love life? Jeff: Not very active. Lisa: Anything else bothering you? Jeff: Yes, who are you?
Jeff: She wants me to marry her. Stella: That's normal. Jeff: I don't want to. Stella: That's abnormal.
Lisa: Today's a very special day. Jeff: It's just another Wednesday. The calendar's full of 'em.
Jeff: When am I going to see you again? Lisa: (angry) Not for a long time... (softening) at least not until tomorrow night.
Jeff: Why would a man leave his apartment three times on a rainy night with a suitcase and come back three times? Lisa: He likes the way his wife welcomes him home.
Lisa: I wish I were creative. Jeff: You are. You're great at creating difficult situations.
Jeff: He killed a dog last night because the dog was scratching around in the garden. You know why? Because he had something buried in that garden that the dog scented. Lt Doyle: Like an old hambone? Jeff: I don't know what pet names Thorwald had for his wife.
Stella: Let's go down there and find out what's burried in that garden. Lisa: Why not? I've always wanted to meet Mrs Thorwald.
Stella: Intelligence. Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence.
Lt Doyle: Look Miss Fremont, that feminine intuituon stuff sells magazines, but in real life it's still a fairy tale.
Lisa: Jeff, you know if someone came in here, they wouldn't believe what they'd see? You and me with long faces plunged into despair because we find out a man didn't kill his wife. We're two of the most frightening ghouls I've ever known.
Stella: Must've splattered a lot.
Lisa: Tell me exactly what you saw and what you think it means.
Lisa: According to you, people should be born, live, and die in the same place.
Stella: 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? Jeff: Readers Digest, April 1939. Stella: Well, I only quote from the best.
Lisa: A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window.
Stella: You'd think the rain would've cooled things down. All it did was make the heat wet.
(Lisa wants to be part of Jeff's globe-trotting life of adventure) Jeff: You'd have to eat things that you wouldn't want to look at while they were alive.
Lisa: I'm not much on rear window ethics.
Lt Doyle: People do a lot of things in private they couldn't possibly explain in public.
Stella: Nobody ever invented a polite word for a killin' yet.
Stella: Every man's ready to get married when the right girl comes along.
Stella: I can hear you now: "Get out of my life, you wonderful woman. You're too good for me."
Lt Doyle: You didn't see the killing or the body. How do you know there was a murder? Jeff: Because everything this fellow's done has been suspicious: trips at night in the rain, knifes, saws, trunks with rope, and now this wife that isn't there anymore. Lt Doyle: I admit it does have a mysterious sound. But it could be any number of things for the wife disappearing. Murder is the least part. Jeff: Now,Doyle, don't tell me that he's just an unemployed magician amusing the neighborhood with his slight of hand. Don't tell me that.
(first lines) Voice on radio: Men, are you over 40? When you wake up in the morning, do you feel tired and rundown? Do you have that listless feeling - Jeff: (answering phone) Jefferies. Gunderson: Congratulations, Jeff! Jeff: For what? Gunderson: For getting rid of that cast! Jeff: Who said I was getting rid of it? Gunderson: This is Wednesday; seven weeks from the day you broke your leg. Yes or no? Jeff: Gunderson, how did you ever get to be such a big editor with such a small memory? Gunderson: By thrift, industry, and hard work... and, uh, catching the publisher with his secretary. Did I get the wrong day? Jeff: No... no, wrong week. *Next* Wednesday I emerge from this plaster cocoon.
Jeff: I get myself half killed for you and you reward me by stealing my assignments. Gunderson: I didn't ask you to stand in the middle of that automobile racetrack. Jeff: You asked for a, something dramatically different. You got it. Gunderson: So did you.
Gunderson: It's about time you got married, before you turn into a lonesome and bitter old man. Jeff: 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... Gunderson: Jeff, wives don't nag anymore. They discuss. Jeff: Oh, is that so, is that so? Well, maybe in the high-rent district they discuss. In my neighborhood they still nag.
Stella: The New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse. Jeff: Oh, hello, Stella. Stella: And they got no windows in the workhouse.
Stella: You heard of that market crash in '29? I predicted that. Jeff: Oh, just how did you do that, Stella? Stella: Oh, simple. I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said. Nerves, I said. And 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 ten times a day, the whole country's ready to let go.
Jeff: She's too perfect, she's too talented, she's too beautiful, she's too sophisticated, she's too everything but what I want. Stella: Is, um, what you want something you can discuss?
Stella: When I married Miles, we were both a couple of maladjusted misfits. We are still maladjusted misfits, and we have loved every minute of it.
Jeff: Would you fix me a sandwich, please? Stella: Yes, I will. And I'll spread a little common sense on the bread.
(describing a dress) Lisa: A steal at eleven hundred dollars. Jeff: Eleven hundred? They ought to list that dress on the stock exchange.
Jeff: She's like a queen bee with her pick of the drones. Lisa: I'd say she's doing a woman's hardest job: juggling wolves.
Jeff: She sure is the "eat, drink and be merry" girl. Stella: Yeah, she'll wind up fat, alcoholic and miserable.
Stella: Maybe one day she'll find her happiness. Jeff: Yeah, some man'll lose his.
Jeff: I just can't figure it. He went out several times last night in the rain carrying his sample case. Stella: Well, he's a salesman, isn't he? Jeff: Well, what would he be selling at three o'clock in the morning? Stella: Flashlights. Luminous dials for watches. House numbers that light up.
Stella: He's gonna run out on her, the coward. Jeff: Sometimes it's worse to stay than it is to run.
Lt Doyle: Jeff, you've got a lot to learn about homicide. Why, morons have committed murders so shrewdly that it's taken a hundred trained police minds to catch them.
Jeff: Are you interested in solving this case or in making me look foolish? Lt Doyle: Well, if possible, both. Jeff: Well then, do a good job of it.
Lt Doyle: One thing I don't need is heckling. You called me and asked for help. Now you're behaving like a taxpayer.
Lisa: Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that? Jeff: He gets it from the landlady once a month.
Lt Doyle: What do you say we all sit down and have a nice friendly drink too, hmm? Forget all about this. We can tell lies about the good old days during the war.
Lt Doyle: Oh, Jeff, if you need any more help, consult the yellow pages in your telephone directory. Lisa: Oh, I love funny exit lines.
Lisa: Why would Thorwald want to kill a little dog? Because it knew too much?
Stella: (to Lisa) You haven't spent much time around cemeteries, have you?
Lisa: Well, if there's one thing I know, it's how to wear the proper clothes.
(last lines) Newlywed woman: ... but if you'd told me you quit your job, we wouldn't have gotten married. Newlywed man: Oh, honey, come on.