Film Review: Alfred Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW *****
A magazine photographer, confined to a wheelchair “in a two-room apartment with nothing to do but look out the window at the neighbors,” becomes convinced he has witnessed evidence of a gruesome murder across the courtyard.
As near perfect as a movie can get, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window is arguably the Master’s greatest film, a virtual textbook of film technique, and inarguably one of the greatest of all Hollywood entertainments (see NOTES).
First, it does everything a Hitchcock film is supposed to do and does it in duplicate: it is eminently suspenseful, building on a slowly rising line of tension until the audience is in total conspiracy with its protagonist, culminating in a final thirty minutes that are the very definition of the edge-of-your-seat finale; it affords the most experimental of famous directors the chance to openly play with film theory, in this case giving himself the challenge of shooting on a single, confined set, using nothing but shot/reverse shot editing to make all of his points; it has Hitchcock’s most glamorous blonde heroine, the hypnotically beautiful Grace Kelly; and it is a genuine work of art, for those who are interested in that sort of thing, wrapped in the guise of a slick, witty, big budget entertainment.
Second, its design is flawless: a man stuck in a wheelchair, looking out the window, sees evidence of a murder, yes, but what else does he see? The lives on view in the windows across the way begin to reflect aspects of Jeffries’ (James Stewart’s) own psyche back to him, just as he projects his attitudes toward love and marriage upon them, while Hitchcock pulls back the curtain on the loneliness of urban life and the bittersweet realities of romantic idealism. Through the simple device of showing us a dozen or so windows that reveal snippets here and there of life’s tragedies, big and small, Hitchcock sets up a kaleidoscopic commentary on 20th Century love and its attendant anxieties.
But what critics and scholars most like to talk about when they turn to Rear Window is its schematic exploration of the voyeuristic impulse, and the ways in which the film pulls audiences into a whirlpool of guilty conspiracy with Jeffries’ mad quest to pry on the neighbors.
There is a moment when Ms. Kelly, as Lisa, says, “You and me with long faces, plunged into despair because we find out a man didn’t kill his wife. We’re two of the most frightening ghouls I’ve ever known.” Lisa is not just talking about herself and Jeff, she’s talking about all of us, too, sitting out there in the dark of the theater, our attention rapt on the window-like movie screen, waiting, just waiting for some sign that proves Lars Thorwald really murdered his wife. It’s at this point that Rear Window unveils its gorgeous labyrinth of mirrors to the audience, for if we are all double voyeurs while watching this film, eagerly gazing into Jeff’s world and over his shoulder into the mysteries across the courtyard, then aren’t we always voyeurs at the movies, staring without shame into what Lieutenant Doyle calls that “secret, private world out there”? This is the level critics are talking about when they say Rear Window is above all a film about filmmaking and -watching. No other film I know implicates the audience so thoroughly in our own guilty behavior, and makes us like it, too (though Hitchcock‘s Psycho, 1960, comes damned close).
Oh, and did I mention Rear Window is one of the all-time great entertainments? Stewart is at his most brilliant in this film, delivering every witticism with deadpan accuracy and proving conclusively his own dictum that movies are made up of “little pieces of time.” As his performance unfolds, keep in mind that most of his reactions were shot in isolation: just Stewart, the camera crew, and Hitchcock telling him what he was supposed to be seeing. The actual Miss Torso was having lunch, or the day off. Technically, it is like a reversion to silent film acting.
Likewise, Kelly is at her smartest, sexiest and funniest, the epitome of 1950s screen chic, while Thelma Ritter effortlessly displays how she chalked up six Oscar nominations for Supporting Actress in twelve years (1950-62). She was a master scene-stealer when in the company of lesser actors; sandwiched here between Stewart and Kelly, she has to draw on her fanciest moves to create one of her most memorable characters, Stella, the riotously funny conscience of the film.
Finally, Rear Window is simply the Master of Suspense at the peak of his form. Other Hitchcock classics are more frightening, or more deeply felt, or in a few cases more playful, but none is so elegantly constructed, or so efficient in creating and sustaining its effects. It’s a film that can be watched again and again, a masterpiece that still moves contemporary audiences to laugh and gasp in all the right places more than a half century after it was made.
Rear Window
produced & directed by Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay by John Michael Hayes, from story by Cornell Woolrich; director of photography, Robert Burks; edited by George Tomasini; music by Franz Waxman
with: James Stewart (L. B. Jeffries), Grace Kelly (Lisa Fremont), Thelma Ritter (Stella), Wendell Corey (Tom Doyle), Raymond Burr (Lars Thorwald)
1 hr., 52 m.; Paramount, rated PG
NOTES:
THE CAMEO: Hitchcock makes his trademark cameo appearance at 25 minutes into the film, winding the clock in the songwriter’s apartment.
THE SET: Filmed entirely on a set Hitchcock designed with the heads of the Paramount studio art department and modeled on a real Greenwich Village courtyard. A large section of a soundstage floor was excavated to accommodate the structure, which was 185 feet long, thirty-eight feet deep, forty feet high, and contained thirty-one apartments. Twelve of the apartments were furnished, and Thorwald’s apartment was fully habitable, with electricity and running water.
HOW TO WING IT: Hitchcock is famous as a filmmaker who meticulously prepared his movies, using detailed storyboards to map the shot arrangement of every scene. The truth is, he often experimented on-set to give himself the widest range of choices in editing. Camera reports for Rear Window show that he ordered alternate takes on every scene and shot key moments from a variety of angles. Example: his use of telephoto lenses throughout the film, changing the viewer’s proximity to the other windows for emotional effect (particularly Thorwald’s), getting closer to them as Jeff becomes more involved. Hitchcock shot each scene in the other apartments several times from the same angle, but with ever stronger lenses, each one changing the size of the actors in the frame, subliminally indicating that we’re still seeing what Jeff sees, even though our perspective is actually much closer than his would be.
ACTING FOR THE CAMERA: There is a fascinating mixture of acting styles in the film: Stewart’s approach, and Kelly’s and Ritter’s, is up-to-the-minute, 1954 cinematic realism, with understated gestures and expressions, while the playlets performed beyond the other windows and in the courtyard are highly theatrical pantomime — big gestures, over the top reactions, exaggerated emotions — largely because the camera is so much farther away from them. Except, that is, for the Thorwald’s Drama. In typical Hitchcockian counterpoint, the Thorwalds begin the film performing mostly mundane activities, but as the film progresses there is an increasing slowness of movement in their apartment, sometimes complete stillness, which contrasts menacingly with the urban exuberance all around them.
“IF YOU’RE SQUEAMISH, JUST DON’T LOOK”: The screenplay was written by Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes in collaboration, with the director dictating situations, dramatic arcs and plot structure. Hayes wrote the dialogue, and what marvelous dialogue it is, too. Hayes also collaborated with Hitch on To Catch a Thief (again, priceless dialogue) and The Trouble with Harry (both 1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
Hitchcock never took screen credit for writing, although this was his relationship with most of his writers throughout his career. He also did not take credit for set designs, lighting designs, cinematography, film editing, or promotional schemes, but he was intimately involved with these decisions, to varying degrees, on all of his 53 films.
THE SOUND MIX: a good experiment for those who believe dialogue is the most important part of a movie: watch the first ten minutes of Rear Window with the sound turned off. Watch the last twenty.
If watching with the sound turned up, listen only to the rise and fall of ambient noises — cars, sirens, justified music, offscreen voices — and the choices Hitchcock and his sound men make, the times they choose to use a particular effect to underscore the images. The sound editing of Rear Window is like a second music score.
RECOMMENDED READING: Hitchcock at Work, by Bill Krohn; Acting in the Cinema, by James Naremore (chapter 13).
OTHER “GREATEST” HITCHCOCK FILMS: rival Hitchcock films in contention among critics for recognition as his masterpiece: Vertigo (1958), North By Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960). Personally, I think they’re all great.
AWARDS: the #5 box-office attraction of 1954; number 42 on the 1999 AFI List of 100 Greatest Movies (2007 update: in the second AFI 100 released in 2007, Rear Window dropped to 48th).
An Oscar nominee for Best Director, Adapted Screenplay, Color Cinematography, and Sound Recording. Grace Kelly took home the Best Actress Oscar that same year (1954) for a more “serious” movie, The Country Girl. Hitchcock was nominated for Best Director a total of five times without ever winning. He was given a special Life Achievement Oscar in 1969. He gave a deadpan, two word acceptance speech: “Thank you.”
THE RESTORATION: Restored last year by Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz, the team that revived Vertigo (1958) to its original Technicolor-VistaVision glory in the nineties, Rear Window is being re-released in major urban areas, soon to be available on DVD.
Harris and Katz had considerably more trouble with this film because some of the original elements had deteriorated beyond repair. The restoration is therefore extremely uneven from scene to scene, especially when trying to capture the original lush hues of Robert Burks’ cinematography. Interestingly, the film is so good, it doesn’t really matter.
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID:
“To approach the film only as a light diversion may in fact…indict a viewer, along with Jeff, as one who merely peers at the lives of others from a distance and leaves unexamined his own inner life.” — Donald Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock
“…Hitchcock’s most uncompromising attempt to imprison us, not only within a limited space, but within a single consciousness.” — Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films
“I was feeling very creative at the time, the batteries were well charged.” — Alfred Hitchcock, in conversation with Francois Truffaut
Eric Barker is a writer and independent filmmaker living in Denver.
