None of Hitchcock’s films has ever given a clearer view of his genius for suspense than Rear Window. When professional photographer J.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart) is confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg, he becomes obsessed with watching the private dramas of his neighbors play out across the courtyard. When he suspects a salesman may have murdered his nagging wife, Jeffries enlists the help of his glamorous socialite girlfriend (Grace Kelly) to investigate the highly suspicious chain of events… Events that ultimately lead to one of the most memorable and gripping endings in all of film history.Like the Greenwich Village courtyard view from its titular portal, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window is both confined and multileveled: both its story and visual perspective are dictated by its protagonist’s imprisonment in his apartment, convalescing in a wheelchair, from which both he and the audience observe the lives of his neighbors. Cheerful voyeurism, as well as the behavior glimpsed among the various tenants, affords a droll comic atmosphere that gradually darkens when he sees clues to what may be a murder.
Photographer L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart) is, in fact, a voyeur by trade, a professional photographer sidelined by an accident while on assignment. His immersion in the human drama (and comedy) visible from his window is a by-product of boredom, underlined by the disapproval of his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), and a wisecracking visiting nurse (Thelma Ritter). Yet when the invalid wife of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) disappears, Jeff enlists the two women to help him to determine whether she’s really left town, as Thorwald insists, or been murdered.
Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto convincingly argues that the crime at the center of this mystery is the MacGuffin–a mere pretext–in a film that’s more interested in the implications of Jeff’s sentinel perspective. We actually learn more about the lives of the other neighbors (given generic names by Jeff, even as he’s drawn into their lives) he, and we, watch undetected than we do the putative murderer and his victim. Jeff’s evident fear of intimacy and commitment with the elegant, adoring Lisa provides the other vital thread to the script, one woven not only into the couple’s own relationship, but reflected and even commented upon through the various neighbors’ lives.
At minimum, Hitchcock’s skill at making us accomplices to Jeff’s spying, coupled with an ingenious escalation of suspense as the teasingly vague evidence coalesces into ominous proof, deliver a superb thriller spiked with droll humor, right up to its nail-biting, nightmarish climax. At deeper levels, however, Rear Window plumbs issues of moral responsibility and emotional honesty, while offering further proof (were any needed) of the director’s brilliance as a visual storyteller. –Sam Sutherland
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April 14, 2008
#1
I dont see how anyone could rate this movie 5 stars…the most
horrible movie ever…There is nothing left to say i dont wanna waste my time talking about this movie.
April 14, 2008
#2
So you’ve got this photojournalist took a spill at the track and he’s just lounging around with not a care in the world and what does he do but spy on innocent dames getting undressed like a super-perv. And he’s already got this hot cupcake he’s just giving the cold shoulder cuz she likes it, sick bobby-soxer. And this bloke wants all the broads in the apartment complex so when Perry Mason begins sniffing around for a date, George Bailey creates these fantasies involving murder and nighttime gardening. And the F-er actually gets away with it. And everyone crowns it a masterpiece because we celebrate voyeurism in this country. Why else do you think there are spy cameras everywhere? It’s sickening and I’m not having any of it.
April 14, 2008
#3
Alfred Hitchcock made approximately zero good movies in his life except maybe The Birds, which I liked a lot. But most of his movies, including and especially Rear Window are just two hours of people sitting around talking about suspenseful things. I know because they’re old these movies are supposed to be so great, but you can’t tell me that Rear Window is as exciting as a movie like Disturbia!!! I guess you can tell me that, but I don’t plan to listen to you.
Here’s what happens in Rear Window:
No, I didn’t make a mistake in that paragraph. I was proving a point that nothing happens (by leaving a lot of blank space after the colon). It’s a movie about Jimmy Stewart sitting in a wheelchair and watching real action happen through binoculars. Guess what, Alfred Hitchcock? Maybe it would have been a better movie if we had been watching whatever was going on in that other building and not wasted our time watching the guy who was watching all the cool stuff go down!
That would be like if Steven Spielberg decided to make E.T. a story about a scientist in a lab coat who does nothing for 2 hours and then at the end he gets to poke and prod a little alien fella for about a second. Hey, Steven Spielberg: thanks for not making that movie!!!
Anyway, Rear Window is not recommended for the young or the young at heart, but maybe for the young at brain.
April 14, 2008
#4
The ending is total bull. The dude with the gray hair really did murder his wife, that’s all. Nothing tricky, mysterious, or “surprise” about it. Oh, and ALL of the characters in the apartment building have sweet, happy endings that miraculously coincide with the gray-haired dude’s arrest. Oh puke. Jimmy Stewrat plays an obsessive loser in a wheelchair who treats the women in the movie with little or no respect. Must be he’s good-looking, cuse he can’t act his way out of a damp paper sack. And that ending, oh man. The author didn’t even offer any explainations to smooth out the glaring inconsistencies the ending created. Just, gray-hair did it. That’s all. He offed his wife. For some reason. What reason? She nagged him, apparently that’s grounds for murder in this movie. I suppose, no other motive is EVER offered. She nagged him, he chopped her up or something. WTF. Hopefully, this review will save some of you the trouble. Monumental letdown after what seemed to be a good movie about a delusional lunatic who preferred spying on his neighbors to spending some nice special time with his loving hot girlfriend.
April 15, 2008
#5
Some films show their age, and others do not. Despite its reputation as a classic of great filmmaking, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window, unfortunately, shows its age far too much. No, it’s certainly not a bad film, by any standard, and is a pretty good one, but it’s not one of Hitchcock’s best, much less a great film, nor deserving of any place in the Top 100 Films lists of the last few years. Technically, it deserves many plaudits, but what really fails is the screenplay, written originally by John Michael Hayes for a radio play, and adapted from a short story by Cornell Woolrich. Yes, one can suspend disbelief from night till day comes, but the whole idea that a man would murder his wife and cut up her body all in front of an open window is sheerly implausible, even back in the 1950s New York milieu the film takes place in. Even one of the film’s characters, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) comments on that fact, but it’s not with irony, which only highlights the film’s greatest failing- its implausibility.
Now, there are genres where the suspension of disbelief is absolutely essential. For example, one of my favorite films from childhood, the original Planet Of The Apes (1968) requires a great suspension of disbelief, far more so than Rear Window does. After all, the Charlton Heston character, Colonel Taylor, a veteran trained astronaut and scientist, goes throughout the whole film not recognizing the sun and moon, the constellations, the unlikely evolutionary odds that humans and apes could evolve anywhere but Earth, and that the apes speak English, no less! It’s not until he sees the wreck of the Statue Of Liberty that he realizes he’s back on our world. I was four or five when I first saw the film, and knew it was Earth a minute or two after the astronauts arrived on the Planet Of The Apes. Perhaps too closely studying books on geology and science destroys a youthful ability to suspend disbelief, but the rest of the film was so brilliantly satirical that the implausibilities were minor solecisms. In short, there is no story unless we accept these liberties with common sense, including the fact that the astronauts could be frozen in suspended animation for two eons. It’s an all or none proposition- accept, or walk out of the theater. Genres that depend on the implausible- like sci fi and horror, demand such of their audience, and once given it’s foolish to quibble over things like time travel, faster than light speed, aliens, modern dinosaurs, ghosts, atomic age mutants, or the like….The plot is well known…. While not a great film overall, Rear Window is a technically great film. The camera work by cinematographer Robert Burks is first rate, and the film goes over many standard Hitchcock themes such as voyeurism- especially apt in this cyberworld of 24/7 voyeurism, marriage as a horror, and challenging technical restrictions, as in Lifeboat and Rope. There are many small moments in the film that work for effect- such as pure mise-en-scene shots of Jeff or the neighbors doing minor things unrelated to the main tale. And, there is some comedy, such as after Jeff is tossed out the window, and Thorwald is arrested, Stella comments to the cops, `I don’t want any part of it’, when asked about assisting in the search for Anna Thorwald’s body. Still, none of the many pluses of the film are enough to lift the film up from a good, solid period piece, for Rear Window’s reputation is based largely upon its claim to being a slice of `realism’. It’s not. It’s far closer to melodrama with its reliance on coincidences and implausibilities- not to mention the very sexism of the premise that a woman is so predictable that even her murder can be deduced by small deviances from that predictability, to propel the main action along. And melodrama, while it can often be great fun, is almost never great art. Rear Window is vastly overrated, and no exception that proves the rule. It is the rule, and that’s a fact no amount of suspended disbelief can alter.