By that criterion, Stewart must have been particularly attentive at the end of 1953, when he began shooting Rear Window with Kelly. His initial resistance to another teaming with Hitchcock gave way before several factors. One was the story itself. Even before admitting that he was intrigued by a John Michael Hayes treatment of the original Cornell Woolrich tale, he had heard from old friends Leland Hayward and Josh Logan that they too thought highly enough of the property to look into filming possibilities. Another reassurance came with Hitchcock's promise that Rear Window would not degenerate into Rope II—a technical exercise that left the actors feeling like supernumeraries on the set. And, as important as anything, there was the fact that Lew Wasserman was also Hitchcock's agent. The MCA representative worked out an elaborate agreement with Paramount that not only guaranteed the director a core team of his favorite production people over several films and a top-of-the-line budget for his undertakings, but that, with specific regard to Rear Window, cut Stewart in for a percentage of the profits.

Few Hollywood films have lent themselves to reductionist analyses more than Rear Window. The voyeurism suggested by the central character has been the least of it. Various things have all been divined in one line of dialogue or another. Cineastes have found it to be a parody on the moviemaking process, the politically minded have discerned in it a commentary on the spying mentality fostered by McCarthyism, and the sociologically inclined have squeezed their chins over the exact meaning of the social mix represented as living in the apartment house watched by the photographer. Lending comfort to almost all such readings at one point or another was Hitchcock, who could be as voluble about his work as any director who ever lived. Some interviewers have taken him at his word. Others have taken the word as only a distraction from a waddling neurosis too good to be true. All have found it hard to abstract the conflicts of his pictures from the rotund and gelatinous little man whom James Mason once called "a squishy eunuch" and whom Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto saw as casting Stewart for protagonists he considered himself to be and Cary Grant for the ones he would have liked to have been.

If Stewart had reservations about being a surrogate for a cinematic psychodiary, he had cause to be concerned the very first day of production when Hitchcock spent a half-hour shooting the shoes of the Kelly character (an insert never used in the film) and didn't hesitate to shrug off a query about it with a "Haven't you ever heard of a shoe fetish?" It didn't take long, either, for it to become evident that the director was back to the Svengali posture with his female star that he had adopted during Dial M for Murder and that would lead him to try to "recreate" Kelly in later years with Vera Miles, Kim Novak, and Tippi Hedren. At another early point, he ordered twenty-seven takes of a shot of Kelly kissing Stewart on the forehead. But initially at least, the actor had more worries about the set that occupied an entire Paramount soundstage and that was the grandest ever built by the studio outside those required for the spectaculars of Cecil B. DeMille. With Rope-like familiarity, Hitchcock doted on showing visitors how the set consisted of thirty-one apartments—twelve of which had been completely furnished even though they were never to be seen except through windows and from a distant line of vision of the characters in the photographers apartment.

But even in the midst of his enthusiasm for the new toy that his technical staff had given him, Hitchcock had enough differences from Rope going for him to allay Stewart's apprehensions of another mechanical slog coming. Most obviously, the enormous courtyard set had already been built and so, elaborate to the point of excess or not, it was a stationary object that could not pre-occupy the director to the exclusion of the story or the actors. Moreover, it was a stationary object viewed almost totally from the point of view of the Stewart character, in effect giving him not only the role of a photographer named Jeffries, but also that of the Rear Window camera. The only exceptions to this double function came when the actor himself was shown on the screen— making him about as omnipresent as any film performer could hope to be. With his technical set problems already worked out in pre-production, it was also a much more amiable, even buoyant, Hitchcock who guided the Rear Window shooting; in contrast to the frayed filmmaker who had drunk even more than Stewart during Rope or the nasty one who had once cracked after Milland had flubbed a line in Dial M for Murder:

"I wind it up and put it on the floor—and it doesn't work!"