Movie Masterworks

“We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.”

Synopsis: 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.

Critique: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window - made in 1954 and just restored for re-release - is a miraculous film. It’s a witty, sexy, supremely entertaining thriller. It’s also the most provocative meditation on moviegoing ever made.

On its face, it’s an allegory so transparent it risks banality. Photographer L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart), immobilized with a shattered leg, spends his convalescence spying on his neighbors. Alone in his apartment, he has a multiplex to himself, with a different genre playing in each window. There’s Miss Lonelyhearts’ tearful melodrama, the romantic farce of Miss Torso and her suitors, and the stark drama of the travelling salesman and his bedridden wife, which soon begins to look instead like a murder mystery.

The film remains unsettling because Hitchcock took such sadistic glee in implicating the audience in Jefferies’ voyeurism. When his girlfriend admonishes him for his ghoulishness, she’s talking to us as well. Hitchcock is rigorously exacting in the extent to which he forces us to experience the events through Jefferies. The camera angles match his position (when he uses a camera’s zoom lens to get a better view, we finally get the closer shots we’ve been craving) and the soundtrack reveals only what he could hear, burying his neighbors’ conversations in the ambient drone of city buses. The scenes are kept short and always end in fades. This has the effect of making the material seem abrupt and somehow unfinished, leaving us hanging on for more, as desperate as Jefferies for the next revelation. When he finally pushes past simple voyeurism and begins to act on his suspicions, the risks he takes on become our risks; our identification with him is so complete that moments that might have been nicely suspenseful jolts in a typical thriller become terrifying.

-Gary Mairs, Culturevulture.net