Cornell Woolrich

Who is (or, rather, was) Cornell Woolrich? Well, he was a popular crime writer in the 1900's,up there with Chandler so they said. He wrote heaps of novels (27) and short stories (hundreds) and some of his stories were made into films; indeed, 31 of them were adapted for the screen. I was surprised to discover that Hitchcock's "Rear Window" was adapted from one of his short stories - saw the film in Chapter Arts Centre this week and believe it to be Hitchcocks's best, superior to "Vertigo" which was recently judged to be the greatest film ever made by Sight and Sound magazine which, every ten years, draws up a list of the 10 - or is it 100? - best films made.
Another of one of my favourite films was an adaptation of a Woolrich short story: "The Window" which starred the ten year old Bobby Driscoll as a lad who went around telling porkies, tales that made people anxious only to find that the boy had made them up. It was a "cry wolf" kind of story because when the boy witnesses a real murder, no one believes him. It's a remarkable B picture,  a real thriller with an outstanding cast: Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale as the boy's parents and Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman as the killer and his wife.
Another of Woolrich's stories - a novel in fact - was made into a film, a 'film noire': "Night has a thousand eyes" with Edward G. Robinson. I must have seen this film. Surely I wouldn't have missed a film like this with an actor whom I admired more than Bogart - and that's saying a lot.
I have a collection of 12 of Cornell Woolrich's short stories and have just started one: "The Corpse next Door" about a man with a temper who is so enraged by the disappearance of his milk bottles every morning or so that he 's determined to catch the culprit; he does, and in a fit of rage, kills him. What does he do with the body? Well, there's an open door nearby - must be where the felon lives - so he drags the body there and dumps him in one of those beds that spring up against a wall..... I don't know what happens next but will soon find out. Great stuff. He wrote great stories but I'm afraid he is largely forgotten now. Pity.