by Louis Williams

Created on: March 14, 2011

One question: why do we learn so little about James Stewart in this movie? All we know is that he is a policeman, a plain clothes man, with political ambitions and an independent income. We also know that, earlier in his life he had been engaged to Barbara Bel Geddes, who is still his friend, who is, in fact, his only friend, and that she is an artist working on uplift bras, or something. Beyond these facts, though, and the fact that he owns a Dodge, lives modestly but comfortably alone, and had an accident that has made him resign from the force, we know nothing.

We see the accident at the beginning of the film, at least part of it. Chasing a culprit over the rooftops of San Francisco, Stewart leaps to a new roof, misses his purchase and winds up hanging by a rain gutter several stories up. The policeman with him tries to help him, loses his balance, falls to the street and dies. When we last see Stewart he is still hanging from the gutter. Did he fall? The movie never says, though we presume he did, since, in the next scene he complains about the corset he has had to wear since the roof incident. Whatever the case, his rain gutter experience has left him with an extreme fear of heights, so extreme that even climbing stairs makes him dizzy and ill.

He is then asked by an old friend to tail his wife, who has been acting strangely. In the process, Stewart falls in love with the wife, played by Kim Novak, only to see her run into the bell tower of an old Spanish Mission and, shortly afterward, while he is dizzily trying to climb the stairs after her, fall past a window.

Her death renders him catatonic for a year. When he recovers enough to be on his own, he accidently meets a girl who looks just like Novak, persuades her to dress and fix her hair as his lost true love did, only to find out, when she puts on a piece of jewelry that he remembers, that she is indeed the girl he loved, and that she had been involved with the old friend in a scheme to kill his wife, she substituting for the wife, for Stewart’s benefit, the idea being that Stewart, sick as he is of heights, will be the perfect witness—sick enough to climb the stairs partway,  but not all the way to the top of the bell tower where the husband and Novak are in hiding with the real wife, previously killed, being the body Stewart sees falling past the window.

After learning her true identity, Stewart takes Novak back to the tower as punishment, realizes how deeply he loves her, then sees

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