Rear Window

The next Hitchcock film that the great James Stewart starred in was the 1954 classic, “Rear Window.” Stewart plays a photographer named L.B. Jeffries, or simply “Jeff” to his fiancée. Because of his broken leg, he stays in his apartment sitting on his wheelchair. Out of boredom, he starts to look outside his window and see what his neighbors are doing every day. Since we only get to see his apartment or his point of view of his neighbors, we start feeling obsessed like him. We have been taught since childhood to not spy on others, but aren’t we doing that whenever we watch a movie? Hitchcock portrays just that in this movie with Jeff.

Since Jeff doesn’t leave his apartment, he only gets two visitors. One is his nurse Stella, played by Thelma Ritter, who warns him about the crime. “The New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse.” The other is his fiancée, Lisa Fremont, played by Grace Kelly. Lisa is an elegant model and dress designer, who does not like what he does. However, Jeff just wants to stare out at his neighbors just to see what they are doing, and Stella tells him, "What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change."

Hitchcock built this single set so that Jeff’s apartment window can look through other people’s windows either through his binoculars who his camera lens. Day after day, he gets to know some of the other people in the neighboring apartments. One is Miss Lonelyhearts, played by Judith Evelyn, who throws parties for imaginary male callers. Miss Torso, played by Georgine Darcy, throws drink parties for so many guys at a time, one couple (Rand Harper and Havis Davenport) puts their dog in a basket and lowers him to the garden, and a musician (Ross Bagdasarian) who fears his career isn’t going anywhere. Finally, we have Thorvald, played by Raymond Burr, whose wife (Irene Winston) sleeps all day and basically makes him ticked off. One day Jeff can’t see Thorvald’s wife, and after seeing certain clues, suspects that he murdered his wife.

By the way Jeff pieces the puzzle together gives the mood to the movie. Rarely has there been a movie display their methods in plain view. Jeff is incapacitated in his wheelchair while looking through his camera lens, moving it from one window to the next much like how a movie camera would. We are seeing exactly what Jeff sees. Since Jeff is suspecting this murder, we are going along with him because we want to root for him in proving this case.

In the early days of cinema, Russian director Kuleshov experimented on identical shots of a man’s face juxtaposed with other shots. These were neutral shots, which “Rear Window” is like a feature-length presentation of that same exact thing. The shots of Jeff assembling all of his evidence add up to a murder.

Jeff is not a policeman in this film, but a guy who suspects something and he wants to prove it before handing it over to the police. At the end when he is in danger in his own apartment, he uses his camera flash as a weapon. That will help him blind his opponent, and when the man’s eyesight returns, you see a blood-red dissolve which you know something bad is about to happen.

Kelly is a strong love interest in this movie, and there are scenes in which you do see her hurt. She wears pretty dresses like a Disney princess, makes these grand entrances, and treats Jeff to champagne and catered dinners. In the beginning, you do see Jeff wanting to end his relationship with Kelly because he doesn’t like her. There’s this one point-of-view closeup where Ebert comments, “the camera succumbs to her sexuality even if Jeff doesn't; it's as if she's begging the audience to end its obsession with what Jeff is watching, and consider instead what he should be drinking in with his eyes--her beauty.”

The suspense scenes are Hitchcock at his finest. Since Jeff cannot leave his apartment and neither can we, he has to have both Stella and Lisa go out for him. We see the danger that he is putting them into, but they know what he is up to, and we want them to help him, but at the same time, not get hurt. Jeff makes sure to watch from his apartment window.

For this film to go as high on suspense compared to any other film is an achievement of its own. Long ago, Hitchcock explained the difference between suspense and surprise. Surprise is a bomb going off under a table and suspense is when we know the bomb is under the table but don’t know when it will go off. A lot of slasher films use a lot of that surprise element to their advantage, but that doesn’t give us satisfaction. “Rear Window” keeps us in suspense throughout the entire time it runs, and when the final payoff arrives, that’s when it hits us.

Check this film out when you get the chance because it definitely will scare you completely. This is one of my favorite films. In fact, every Hitchcock film that James Stewart starred in are some of my favorite films, but like I had mentioned yesterday, I consider “Rope” the best.

Stay tuned tomorrow when I continue my “Hitchcock/Stewart-a-thon.”