Rear Window Trivia
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90 free Rear Window trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Rear Window trivia quiz covers Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 thriller from every angle a fan could want. There are plot questions on L. B. Jefferies, Lisa Fremont, Stella, Lars Thorwald, Miss Torso, Miss Lonely-Hearts and the songwriter, and production questions on the enormous Greenwich Village courtyard built on Paramount's Stage 18, the 90-second opening shot, the four lighting set-ups, the drainage system for the rain scene, and Hitchcock's clock-winding cameo. It also follows the film's afterlife: Cornell Woolrich's short story It Had to Be Murder, the Supreme Court fight over its rights, the years it spent locked away as one of the Forbidden Five, the Christopher Reeve remake, the Disturbia lawsuit, De Palma's homages and Taylor Swift's borrowed dress. Cast questions reach from Grace Kelly's Edith Head wardrobe to the Chipmunks creator at the piano and the future Perry Mason across the courtyard. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the film, its source story and its cast, and each question quotes the sentence that supports it.
30 of 90 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Rear Window, where did Jeff break his leg?
Racetrack
A racetrack: on assignment, he stood in the middle of it for a dramatic view of a motor race, and a wheel flew off a skidding car. The 1954 film reveals the crash without a word, in its opening shot.
Q 02In Rear Window, who plays the laid-up hero, L. B. 'Jeff' Jefferies?
James Stewart
James Stewart was a partner in the film as well as its star. He and Hitchcock set up the company that produced it, and he worked for a share of the profits instead of a salary.
Q 03In Rear Window, who plays Jeff's socialite girlfriend, Lisa Fremont?
Grace Kelly
Grace Kelly won that year's Best Actress Oscar, though not for this glamorous part. The Academy honoured her for playing a careworn wife in The Country Girl.
Q 04In Rear Window, what is Jeff's profession?
Photojournalist
Photojournalist Jeff insists that Lisa is too pampered for his rough life on the road. He thinks again when she climbs a fire escape in high heels to search a suspected killer's flat.
Q 05In Rear Window, which New York neighborhood is home to Jeff's apartment?
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village really has such a courtyard: the film's set was modelled on one at 125 Christopher Street. The address given on screen, 125 West Ninth Street, does not exist.
Q 06In Rear Window, who plays Stella, the plain-spoken nurse who tends to Jeff?
Thelma Ritter
Thelma Ritter's Stella begins by scolding Jeff that snoopers once had their eyes put out with a red-hot poker. By the end the nurse is out in the courtyard digging for evidence herself.
Q 07In Rear Window, who plays the suspected wife-killer Lars Thorwald?
Raymond Burr
Raymond Burr had spent years playing heavies like Thorwald. Three years later he changed sides, and his defence lawyer Perry Mason won him two Emmys.
Q 08In Rear Window, what is Lars Thorwald's job?
Costume-jewelry salesman
A costume-jewelry salesman has a sample case, which seems to explain his trips out in the rain at night. Lisa is not convinced: no woman, she argues, goes away and leaves her favourite handbag behind.
Q 09In Rear Window, who plays Jeff's skeptical detective friend, Tom Doyle?
Wendell Corey
Wendell Corey's detective checks the story as a favour and comes back with witnesses who saw Thorwald leave for the railway station with a woman. For a while, Jeff's theory collapses.
Q 10In Rear Window, what nickname does Jeff give the dancer across the courtyard?
Miss Torso
Miss Torso spends the film fending off well-dressed admirers. In the last scene her true love comes home: Stanley, a bespectacled soldier who heads straight for the refrigerator.
Q 11In Rear Window, what does Jeff watch the neighbour he calls 'Miss Lonely-Hearts' doing?
Mimes dates with unseen guests
Mimes dates with unseen guests: she lays a table for two and welcomes a caller who is not there. Later she sets out a handful of red pills, and only music from the songwriter's flat stops her.
Q 12Rear Window's struggling songwriter was played by Ross Bagdasarian, who later created what?
Alvin and the Chipmunks
Alvin and the Chipmunks grew out of his tinkering with a tape recorder's speed control. He first used the trick as 'David Seville' on 'Witch Doctor', a number one hit in 1958.
Q 13In Rear Window, what does the anonymous note Jeff sends to Thorwald say?
Q 21In Rear Window's final shot, what does Lisa swap her book for once Jeff dozes off?
A fashion magazine
A fashion magazine: Harper's Bazaar replaces the Himalayan travel book she holds while Jeff is awake. She has put on jeans for his sake, but the film's last joke is that she has not changed at all.
Q 22Rear Window is based on a 1942 short story by which crime writer?
Cornell Woolrich
Cornell Woolrich reprinted the story in 1944 under his pen name, William Irish. The film keeps his premise and little else: a court later judged that the story played only a small part in its success.
Q 23Who wrote the screenplay for Rear Window?
John Michael Hayes
What have you done with her?
What have you done with her? Jeff prints the question in block capitals, and it is the wheelchair-bound man's girlfriend who has to cross the courtyard and slip it under the suspect's door.
Q 14Where does Hitchcock make his cameo in Rear Window?
Winding a clock in the songwriter's apartment
Winding a clock in the songwriter's apartment is his whole part. He stands behind the composer at the piano on the film's first evening, while Lisa is serving Jeff dinner across the way.
Q 15In Rear Window, what does Jeff hear on the night Mrs. Thorwald vanishes?
A scream and breaking glass
A scream and breaking glass are all he hears. He then watches Thorwald come and go in the rain with a case, but he is asleep when the man finally walks out with a woman.
Q 16In Rear Window, what does Thorwald wrap in newspaper the day after his wife disappears?
A knife and a handsaw
A knife and a handsaw, then a trunk tied with rope: to Jeff it adds up to murder. His detective friend is unmoved, asking whether Jeff has ever owned a saw, and how many people he cut up with it.
Q 17In Rear Window, whose death in the courtyard revives Jeff's suspicion of Thorwald?
A little dog
A little dog is found dead, and its owner's cries bring every neighbour to a window but one: Thorwald sits on in his dark flat. The animal had been digging in his flowerbed the day before.
Q 18How does Lisa signal to Jeff that she has found evidence in Thorwald's apartment?
Pointing to her ring finger
Pointing to her ring finger behind her back, she shows Jeff she is wearing Mrs. Thorwald's wedding band. Thorwald notices the gesture and follows it across the courtyard to Jeff's window.
Q 19How does Jeff defend himself when Thorwald finally comes to his darkened apartment?
Blinding him with flashbulbs
Blinding him with flashbulbs buys Jeff only seconds: each burst stops Thorwald in his tracks, then he comes on again. The police arrive just as he is tipping Jeff out of the window.
Q 20In Rear Window, where does Thorwald confess to dumping his wife's remains?
The East River
The East River is no surprise to Stella, who had guessed as much hours before the arrest. Her curiosity fails her only at the end, when she is offered a look inside the hat box and declines.
John Michael Hayes came from radio, where he had written both comedy and suspense. The script won him an Edgar Award and an Oscar nomination, and Hitchcock kept him on for his next three films.
Q 24What grips New York throughout Rear Window and breaks only in the final scene?
A heat wave
A heat wave is why every blind is up and one couple sleeps out on the fire escape, which is what lets Jeff see into so many lives at once. Relief comes only in the closing scene.
Q 25Where was Rear Window's entire New York courtyard actually built?
A Hollywood sound stage
A Hollywood sound stage: Paramount's Stage 18 held 31 apartments around a courtyard sunk below floor level, so that five-storey buildings could stand under one roof. Building it took about six weeks.
Q 26How does Rear Window's final scene show Jeff?
Both legs in casts
Both legs in casts: thrown from his own rear window, he breaks the good leg too. When the film began he was a week from having the first cast taken off.
Q 27In Rear Window, what tells Jeff that Thorwald's flowerbed has been dug up?
An old slide
An old slide: taken two weeks earlier, it shows the blooms standing taller than they do now. Flowers do not grow shorter, Jeff reasons, so someone has dug them up and put them back.
Q 28In Rear Window, who sends Stella to nurse Jeff?
His insurance company
His insurance company sends Stella, who boasts a nose that can smell trouble ten miles away. She smells it in his flat at once, warning that all his window-watching will land him in court.
Q 29In Rear Window, which crooner's voice is heard singing 'To See You Is to Love You' across the courtyard?
Bing Crosby
Bing Crosby had sung it two years earlier in Road to Bali, another Paramount picture. Rear Window has almost no background score: nearly all its music, like this song, drifts in from the neighbours' flats.
Q 30Which composer is credited with Rear Window's score, though most of its music comes from the neighbours' radios?
Franz Waxman
Franz Waxman wrote only the title music and the tune the songwriter struggles with throughout. It was his last job for Hitchcock, whose first Hollywood film, Rebecca, he had also scored.