274. Rear Window (1954)

Running Time: 115 minutes
Directed By: Alfred Hitchcock
Written By: John Michael Hayes, from the story It Had to Be Murder by Cornell Woolrich
Main Cast: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr, Wendell Corey

HITCHCOCKTOBER FEST!: PART VI

The only one of the Hitchcock movies in the book where I could go to my DVD shelf, instead of having to call on Netflix is "Rear Window". I've always been a fan of this movie, a fan of Jimmy Stewart and a fan of the suspense that this movie evokes. I think that it's a very relateable movie, as well, but we'll get into that in a little bit.

I'm sure many of you who are reading this have seen "Rear Window", but I'll go over the plot anyway, because I'm a nice guy like that. Our main character is L.B. Jeffries a.k.a. Jeff (Stewart), a photographer who's been incapacitated due to an accident during one of his shoots. The accident has left him with one broken leg and as a result he's confined to a wheel chair, staring out the rear window of his Greenwich Village apartment, which overlooks a courtyard and several other apartments. His girlfriend is Lisa Fremont (Kelly), a beautiful, wealthy woman, for whom Jeff isn't quite sure of his feelings for. But all of the relationship problems that Jeff and Lisa endure seem to be thrown out the "rear window" when Jeff happens upon some suspicious activity coming from the apartment of The Thorwald residence, where Lars Thorwald and his wife Anna reside. Well...where Lars and his wife Anna DID reside, because Jeff has noticed that Anna has suddenly disappeared and combining that with the unusual activity of Lars, in Jeff's mind it can only point to one thing...murder!

Boy, where do you even begin when it comes to discussing a movie like "Rear Window"? I guess I could start with the cast, and I'm not talking about the one on Jeff's leg. You all know how I feel about Jimmy Stewart, that he's a pleasure for me to watch. In "Rear Window", James seems to throw out his "aww shucks" demeanor for a more voyeuristic persona. He's a bit more gruff and it just doesn't seem like good 'ol Jimmy Stewart to be cradling Grace Kelly in his arms and passionately kissing her. But it is Jimmy Stewart and he's as good as ever. Grace Kelly is just that...graceful...and beautiful and everything you would want in a leading lady, proving that Alfred Hitchcock had an eye for beauty and knew just how to pick his leading women. I also enjoyed Thelma Ritter as the mouthy nurse to Jeff and Raymond Burr, who had almost no lines, yet still managed to scare the bejesus out of you. I just hope to God that no one even resembling Raymond Burr ever lives next door to me, or I'll certainly be forced to move...or buy a good pair of binoculars and a venetian blind.

SPOILER ALERT!

I think the reason that this movie is so loved, is because it is so relateable. How often have you and I looked out our own windows and wondered to ourselves what our neighbors were up to. Maybe we never suspected them of murder, but I'm sure that every single one of us have wondered what they were up to, at some point or another. We see the people around us, our neighbors, and yet often times do not form any relationships with them, so that when they do things that may seem odd to us, we begin to wonder about them. We're surrounded by all these people in our daily lives and for all we know any one of those people could be the evilest of the evil people, doing ungodly things when their blinds are pulled. That's the intriguing thing about "Rear Window", that's the type of thing that I think about when I watch this movie. I also think about the little things, meaning Jeff's broken leg. I mean, think about it, if we think about this story in terms of real life, then if Jeff hadn't broken his leg, Mrs. Throwald's murder would've gone unsolved, Lars Thorwald would have been a free man and Jeff and Lisa would probably have broken up, because they wouldn't have had that extra excitement that they both were intrigued by to patch the bruises in their relationship. Hopefully that all makes sense.

I think Hitchcock excelled the most when he was dealing with relatively simple stories, with simple characters. This movie was quite experimental. We see almost the entire film from the P.O.V. of Jeff's binoculars (or photo lens) and we're constantly staring at a cast of characters that we never really get to know. The characters that we, the viewer, have interest in are, for the most part, the ones behind the binoculars, and so we get interested in what they're interested in. Hitchcock weaves it all together nicely though. It's movies like this one, "Dial M for Murder" and "Rope", where Hitchcock takes interesting characters puts them in one or two locations for the duration of a movie and is able to slip in something special that only Hitchcock had, to make us all intrigued, terrified or interested in the whole story. Hitchcock knew how to give us seemingly a little and leave us with the feeling that we got a lot and he knew how to give us all kinds of obvious suspense and action (IE. "Strangers on a Train") and make that work too.

RATING: 10/10 It's an old favorite and it's an obvious '10' picture. I'll always have a good time while watching this film...always. Next up is "The Man Who Knew Too Much".

MOVIES WATCHED: 163
MOVIES LEFT TO WATCH: 838

October 16, 2010 4:34pm