Chapter 2 of 13 · 4'57"
Stella, Jeff's nurse, treats his window-watching as a crime in progress and his refusal to marry Lisa as a symptom. "I got a nose for trouble," she says, and she means both: the neighbors and Jeff's love life are, to her, the same problem.
Stella Warns Jeff About Peeping
❝ Monologue · 7 lines Stella's courtroom prophecy
She plays judge and defendant at once, turning a warning into a comic scene.
Stella and Jeff Argue About Marrying Lisa
In his New York apartment, Jeff is stuck in a wheelchair with a broken leg, watching his neighbors through the window. His nurse Stella arrives, scolds him for being a 'Peeping Tom,' and insists trouble is coming. Then the talk turns to Lisa, the woman Jeff keeps refusing to marry.
The scene looks like two people killing time while a bandage gets changed, but it's really about the two things Jeff refuses to face. Stella is the film's voice of common sense: she treats his spying as criminal, his love life as a diagnosable condition. When she says "I got a nose for trouble. Can smell it ten miles away," she isn't only talking about the neighbors. Every line she aims at his voyeurism also lands on his refusal to commit: he watches other people's lives because he won't start one of his own. His excuse — that Lisa is "too perfect" and belongs to a "rarefied atmosphere" — is a way of saying he's afraid to be measured against her. Stella calls that exactly what it is.
A1–C2 is the CEFR scale. Cards above the level you pick fade, and playback will not auto-pause on them.
“What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.”
It flips the habit of watching others by suggesting we let ourselves be watched.
Neutral
“Every man's ready for marriage when the right girl comes along.”
It dismisses every excuse by making readiness depend on the right person arriving.
Neutral
“People with sense belong wherever they're put.”
It flattens the class argument with a plain claim about sensible people.
Neutral
“I got a nose for trouble. Can smell it ten miles away.”
Turning intuition into smell gives the nurse a vivid, quotable self-portrait.
Informal
I can smell trouble right here in this apartment. First you smash your leg, then you get to looking out the window, see things you shouldn't see. Trouble. I can see you in court now, surrounded by a bunch of lawyers in double-breasted suits. You're pleading. You say, "Judge, it was only a little bit of innocent fun." "I love my neighbors, like a father." And the judge says, "Well, congratulations." "You've just given birth to three years in Dannemora."
Up next · 03seen better daysThe scene: Lisa Brings Dinner to JeffBecause he spends his days watching the neighbors through his window. She warns him that New York State sentences a Peeping Tom to six months in the workhouse.
He says she's too perfect, too sophisticated and belongs to a 'rarefied atmosphere' of Park Avenue, while he's a photographer who never has more than a week's salary.
She doesn't buy them. She jokes about her 'nose for trouble' and answers his reasons with lines like 'People with sense belong wherever they're put.'
She's an insurance-company nurse who visits Jeff to change his bandage and check his temperature. She mentions once nursing a General Motors director.
He says 'the honest thing' is to 'call the whole thing off' and let her find somebody else, though Stella mocks the idea of him delivering such a speech.
