Hitchcock had an unusually large set constructed to represent the interior courtyard of a New York City apartment complex in a lower middle-class neighborhood. The array of characters visible to the peeping Jeffries exteriorize the tensions and dynamics of his sexual fantasies. They are known to us by the names he assigns them: Miss Torso, a scantily dressed dancer attracts his prurient interest as she exercises or entertains her many suitors; the Newlyweds carry on behind a drawn shade, but when the husband appears at the window for a respite his insatiable wife calls him back for more activity; a middle-aged Miss Lonelyhearts comes to the verge of suicide in her failure to find a suitable companion; an older couple sleep on the fire escape hot summer nights, head to foot; a father is briefly seen dressing his very young daughter. At opposite ends of the courtyard are two artists, of image and sound, corresponding to the two tracks of a film. A middle-aged woman at one side makes modernist sculpture: her annular creation, Hunger , suggests sexual as well as gastronomic need. Her opposite is a young male composer of songs, who drinks too much until his music brings him together with Miss Lonelyhearts.

In the center of this psychic microcosm, a row of windows like a strip of cinematic frames looks in on the apartment of the unhappily married Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) and his bedridden wife. When Mrs. Thorwald disappears, Jeffries convinces himself, his doting girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), and eventually his visiting nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), that Thorwald has murdered her, dismembered her body in the bath-tub, buried some of her limbs in the courtyard, and mailed the rest in a trunk.

Most of the drama is concentrated in the confines of Jeffries’s small apartment. Lisa, an affluent fashion designer, is so eager to get a permanent commitment from the reluctant Jeffries that she has his meals catered from the Stork Club, and ignores his discouragement when she comes to spend the night in the apartment. Stella, a voice of earthy common sense, insists that there must be something wrong with Jeffries to reject the attention of someone like Lisa. Although she puts up a formidable resistance to his “ghoulish” fascination with the Thorwalds, she too enters his fantasy and joins Lisa in a hunt for limbs under flower beds in the yard.