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Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Wendell Cory
USA, 1954
Rated PG (mature themes)
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"We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people oughta do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. How’s that for a bit of homespun philosophy?"
- Stella in Rear Window
Today, I got the blessed chance to catch the re-release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. I do not live in a city that is filled with the opportunities to see revivals of old films in theaters; I have only seen three re-releases in my lifetime, namely Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and now, this Hitchcock masterpiece. All were unforgettable experiences. The film, which I had seen on video before with murky, ugly colors, simply enthralled me. I was overjoyed with the restoration of the film by Robert Harris and James Katz, even though their work on Hitchcock’s greatest film, Vertigo, a few years back was a tad more impressive. I was even more wowed by how effective Rear Window still was on me; this is a suspense film with a tough soul that continues to be thrilling even after subsequent viewings. That was the dubbed-Master of Suspense’s specialty, and Hitchcock certainly was that Master, if you had to choose only one director of the twentieth century. He was one of the only filmmakers in Hollywood and in the mainstream who was endlessly skilled at building suspense-type terror.
Even though Vertigo is Hitchcock’s best, and Psycho runs it a close second, Rear Window, with all its joyous cinematic experiments and the adrenaline rush that occurs at the end of the film, is the most heart-stopping of all the man’s post-‘40s films, and is possibly the most consistently successful one in terms of technique and style. To put it simply, it’s probably the director’s greatest piece of entertainment. Hitchcock’s recurring themes in his films were voyeurism, obsession, and the innocent man accused. Rear Window deals with voyeurism and obsession in the great Master’s way: he does not take his subject too seriously, but he knows what he wants to say and do, and the film’s thematic content is evident but subtly unnerving in its execution. Hitchcock understood that movies are most accessible when entertainment is allowed to reign, but he also understood his craft, and he made his films works of art. Rear Window is not extremely ground-breaking to the extent of a Citizen Kane, Potemkin, or Bonnie and Clyde, but it is an exciting, fresh assessment of darkness that has perhaps improved with age and time and has spawned much in the way of homage and imitation, including Woody Allen’s criminally underrated comedy Manhattan Murder Mystery.
The film, a grand melding of light romantic comedy, gloomy dissection, and Hitchcockian suspense, is about a well-known photographer, L. B. "Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart), who is confined in the tight corners of his apartment because of an injury on the job. He escapes his boredom by spying on his neighbors, one day becoming convinced he has seen a murder. Rear Window opens with a shot of a thermometer displaying the scorching heat of the neighborhood (the thermometer, if you want to stretch for symbolism, could stand for the measurement of the main character’s height of boredom throughout the film, since it is used as a header of the movie’s different chapters). The camera pans across to Jeff, the film’s center, sweating and reclining in his apartment. The camera looks over the surface of the setting, a cramped Greenwich Village neighborhood courtyard, in some of the film’s greatest moments. We soon discover that this is Jeff’s last week in his cast and wheelchair, which keeps him in his monotonous surroundings. "Here lie the broken bones of L. B. Jeffries" is scrawled on his cast. He lies lazily with beads of sweat scattered on his face.
Jeff has spent his weeks in his wheelchair going about his peeping-tom-activities. He indifferently peeks at the neighborhood goings-on. The crowded area and open windows due to the blistering heat allow him to spy on everyone. He is bored and he feels voyeurism is harmless fulfillment. He thinks he has seen a murder when strange things start occurring at the Thorwald apartment across the courtyard. He has observed Lars Thorwald’s (Raymond Burr) invalid wife for several days and one night he sees the man lugging around his suitcase and coming in and out of the apartment. The next day, the wife is nowhere to be seen. Jeff gets out his binoculars and begins to obsessively follow the murder story he has created in his mind, a subconscious concoction of suspense from only scraps of evidence. In one scene, Hitchcock smartly shows us what occurs in Thorwald’s apartment when Jeff is asleep. Nothing really happens, but it is a simple way of showing us that our self-made-neighborhood-sleuth protagonist is missing some possible information.
Most of Rear Window is devoted to showing us Jeff’s perspective. What he sees, we see, and we only know what he knows. Such is the nature of voyeurism; background information is not supplied and one concludes crudely only from what one glimpses at on the surface. Stella (Thelma Ritter), Jeff’s nurse, cracks jokes and reprimands him for his disgusting activities.
Slowly, everyone around Jeff is being sucked into his lustful curiosity of Thorwald and what he thinks is the murder of the man’s wife. He watches from his wheelchair and window and infers and concludes what he can. He, of course, is unknowing of the true story, but he pieces the scenes he sees together into a big, pretend picture. He brings in Stella, a buddy detective, and Lisa, his beautiful girlfriend of the fashion world (Grace Kelly, luminous in ever way). All are skeptical about Jeff’s hypothesis that Thorwald killed his wife, but they are slowly drawn in, and we take on their roles; we, too, are ashamed to even consider Jeff’s voyeuristic murder tale, but the curious and entertaining element of it all makes us forget our shame. The most telling lines in the movie are after Jeff’s detective friend begins to convince them that there was no murder after all. The group immediately becomes discouraged, and Lisa scolds, "Jeff, you know if someone came in here, they wouldn't believe what they'd see? 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."
Rear Window is perfectly crafted. The suspense builds and builds until it explodes in one of the director’s most hectic and exhilarating climaxes ever. Hitchcock is an expert at tying all the strings in his plots, and Rear Window is no exception. The increasing tension throughout the movie is gradual and slow, but it is all sublimely paced and classically electrifying. I suppose, in its own way, Rear Window was something of a ground-breaker, though perhaps not as much as a film like his constantly teasing masterpiece Psycho, or his perversely gory and marvelously entertaining The Birds. It does go against the thematic content of the ‘50’s Doris Day pictures, and it is considerably more daring than any other Alfred Hitchcock movie made prior to its release, both thematically and structurally.
Writer John Michael Hayes, who adapted Cornell Woolrich’s short story, "It Had to be Murder," for the screen, supplies Rear Window with delicious, zinging dialogue, usually for Thelma Ritter’s character, but also a smidgen too much of words that completely give away Rear Window’s themes. Though the excitement is what makes Rear Window palatable with the mainstream audience, it is the stylizing of that excitement and the morose subject matter at hand that makes this one for the time capsule and a work of art that is also an unabashed pop movie.
Hayes’ details on the neighbors Jeff spies on are reserved and briefly sketched. This is especially appropriate because a voyeur does not look deep within his ‘victims,’ he just looks at what occurs externally from his marred, subjective point-of-view. Hayes only paints surfaces and cardboard cut-outs for his neighborhood inhabitants, not people. His string of bit characters include an attractive young ballerina Jeff names "Miss Torso," and a loveless, lonely, middle-aged woman, "Miss Lonelyhearts." "Miss Lonelyhearts’" plight is the most saddening of them all. She is so alone that she holds dinners for imaginary lovers. Things get especially miserable and shocking when, during the climax, Lisa, Stella, and Jeff are more interested in solving their murder than saving her when she, in front of their eyes and in plain sight, is attempting to kill herself. The most noticeable parallel between the neighborhood characters is their marital status or ‘love lives,’ for lack of a better phrase. A neighborhood sculptor lives alone, "Lonelyhearts" is single and lonely, "Miss Torso" waits for her boyfriend to come back home and holds parties for unfeeling men, a resident composer has no girlfriend but always comes home in an alcoholic rage, and a wed couple substitute their lack of children with their beloved dog. Critics have said Jeff sees his possible futures with Lisa through those windows.
The cinematography by Robert Burks brings forth all the heat in the neighborhood and, towards the film’s end, all the heightened, exaggerated anxiety of the climactic sequence. Burks is also able to capture the cool romanticism of Grace Kelly and her Lisa, and the coldness of Jimmy Stewart’s Jeff, who shuns her because he wants to marry the modern, intelligent way. The film radiates not only with artistic gloom, but with the star power that two of the greatest Hollywood stars possessed and exuded. Some scenes between Jeff and Lisa are intimately shot, and are simply breathtaking on the big screen. Since nearly everything in the film is seen from Jeff’s room, Burks must express the claustrophobia and the restraints (Jeff is bound by his cast and wheelchair, and in one scene of peril, he is unable to help Lisa, who is in danger, just as we are incapable of helping any of the film’s characters). Perhaps the best aspect of Rear Window’s Oscar-nominated photography is its successful suggestion of the crowdedness of the film’s setting. The photography succeeds in almost every way.
As for Hitchcock’s choices, he achieves ingenious things in terms of how he structures his content. Hitchcock gives the film a style that has equal parts of elegance and glamour, grit and grim curiosity, and firecracker-excitement. Hitchcock makes the lives Jeff spies on very episodic. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum equated this to "channel-surfing," and I think a tiny reason why Rear Window is so much more potent now (it was critically ignored upon its release, like most of Hitchcock’s other masterpieces) is because of the current status of indispensability of television. When Rear Window was released, it was just the dawn of T.V. popularity. Nowadays, one can immediately spot how Hitchcock likens Jeff’s voyeurism to today’s channel-surfing, and to soap operas, hinting that the very nature of entertainment and storytelling itself lies in voyeurism and the lewd peeking at strangers’ lives. Hitchcock’s mise-en-scène, staging, choreographing, and placing of his visuals is perfect, as are Burks’ fluid movements and framing. For an example of how stunning the film is visually, watch as a lover of "Miss Lonelyhearts’" leaves after a bout of rage when she refuses his kisses. You can see his repulsed reaction at her fear as he walks away from her door, and you can see her struggling in her apartment with herself and her bad luck in love, all simultaneously. In that way, the movie has a slight element of theater. I doubt George Tomasini’s editing could be better; it contributes greatly to the fluidity of Rear Window. Franz Waxman’s score is adequate, but inconspicuous. Hitchcock chooses instead to fill the movie mostly with natural sounds from his location.
In a way, Rear Window has a lot to do with the illusion or the peculiarity of modernity. This is referenced in the scene in which Stella scolds Jeff for not wanting to marry Lisa because of preferable ‘modern’ marriage methods. She scoffs at the new, modern ways of living and courtship, noting that when she was in love with her husband, they never went through analyzing each other to death- they simply got married. On more than one occasion, the new, carefree attitudes of the wife and the woman of 1950’s America are referenced, and these named renewed attitudes are said to have stopped the ‘nagging’ the male characters associate with their wives (or potential wives) in this film. Hitchcock’s supposed villain, Thorwald, is a wounded man with a nagging wife. Because, for a moment, we are allowed to see the human, softer side of Thorwald, Rear Window unearths even more openly the incongruity of reality.
I don’t think Jeff doesn’t want to marry Lisa because he doesn’t love her, or because he thinks she would be unable to adapt her Park Avenue-self to his wild, in-boots life. I think he is unwilling to give himself up, to be responsible for another person’s happiness. Throughout the film, he only thinks of his pleasure, of his boredom, and how things affect him. He witnesses such private moments in the lives of the people he watches, and yet he only thinks of his own passive, momentary enjoyment, not of the witnessed agony or the happiness of his neighbors. It is also obvious that Jeff does not have any wishes to solve the crime or bring Thorwald to justice; he’s just enjoying the ride. The ending doesn’t make Rear Window any less tough. Hitchcock’s closing may seem conflicted with the very premise of his film, and it is even a bit irresponsible, but he realizes that life isn’t as easy or simple as either/or, hero/villain punishments. Jeff is not reprimanded for his deeds. The ending is misleadingly happy. Therein lies Rear Window’s touching upon the impossibility of (political/social/emotional) correctness.
If you want to go even deeper, broader and be more radical (and, to a degree, more pretentious), you could say Rear Window is an allegory for the duality of American culture, in which we stress the importance of being neighborly and civil, while many of us practice the exact opposite and aren’t punished for it but, in some cases, are rewarded. All these deductions of theme would probably have sent Hitchcock laughing, though, and that was the great thing about his gift as a director. When Kim Novak once asked him a technical question about the motivation of her character in Vertigo, Hitchcock is known to have said, "Kim, it’s only a movie."
As for the film’s excellent cast, none of the performances seem at all forced. This film happens to be a pinnacle in the careers of all the three principle actors. James Stewart in Hitchcock films and in westerns is not the James Stewart of Frank Capra films. His obsessive, dark work in Rear Window and Vertigo ranks up there with his awe-inspiring performances as idealists in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. In this film, he is not the Everyman American of the Capra films; he is the Everyman American with a not-so-glossy side, of the Hitchcock films. Grace Kelly simply glows in her best role; her character is intelligent, but isn’t given much credit because of her beauty and her flaunted ‘feminine intuition.’ She is desperate to win the absolute affections of her beau, and is much more mature than he is in her notions about marriage and love and the real world. She and Thelma Ritter, who, as always, steals the show with her out-spoken presence, are the consciences of this film.
Ultimately, Rear Window is about boredom and the loss of romanticism. In one scene, the briefly featured character of a neighborhood female abstract sculptor is creating a figure called "Hunger," a big mass resembling a human with a hole where the stomach would be. Rear Window ponders the ‘hungers’ of all its characters; Lisa feels unappreciated by Jeff, Jeff wants thrills to liven up his uneventful weeks in a cast, and Thorwald is, we assume, hungry for freedom from his crippled, carping wife. Jeff, this film’s constant point-of-view and one of Hitchcock’s most compelling, unsympathetic, and emotionally sick antiheroes, chooses to feed the hole with poison, and trouble inevitably ensues. Even Stella, who resides in this film like a wise, imperfect, uninhibited Jiminy Cricket, could smell trouble watching her patient sneak peeks at his neighbors. If only we would take her advice and "get outside our own houses and look in."
By Andrew Chan
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