Really? Rear Window always seemed like a script that would be ideally served as a play (i.e. not many scene changes) that Hitchcock had adapted well to a movie.
I'm not sure how you would adapt it as a play : how can you capture someone looking at many apartments at a glance in an act ? In a movie, you can just move the camera around in no time from one flat to another, and that effect is incredibly difficult to reproduce in about any other medium.