Rear Window was a 1954 Universal Pictures release, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Raymond Burr, and Thelma Ritter. Alfred Hitchcock is a legendary director, a forefather of the horror genre, and has one of the most highly respected filmographies in American history. This film is no different, being ranked number 48 by American Film Institute’s Top 100 Films in 100 years. The film follows respected photographer L.B. Jefferies (Stewart) who is confined to a wheelchair in his apartment after breaking his leg and passes his aimless time by looking in on the lives of his neighbors across the courtyard in his apartment building. Everything is boring, business as usual, until he believes he may have been witness to a man murdering his bedridden wife and makes it his personal mission to prove it, involving his love interest and at-home nurse with the case. This was less of a Hitchcock horror piece like films such as Psycho or The Birds for example, and more of a mystery/thriller leaving you as the viewer curious and wondering what the truth was and what was potentially being made up in the main character’s head for a majority of the film. The film started off admittedly quite slow by today’s standards and was very dialogue heavy, setting up all of the characters we’d be seeing throughout the runtime and their interpersonal relationships with each other, and took a while to really find its footing and get going, but it did a good job at maintaining my attention in the mystery once things started to heat up.
The acting was very well done by everyone involved, Stewart and Kelly (our leads) are both respected legends in the film industry so that’s no surprise though, and the setting of this movie was so classic and interesting and really drew you into the small space in which this whole movie takes place in. It felt like a stage play played out on film a lot of time because we spent the entirety of the movie in Jefferies apartment and through his first-person viewpoint as he looked across the courtyard into the other occupant’s apartments. Such a small setting but Hitchcock’s storytelling, the excellent camerawork, and the acting all around made it work well. One of the somewhat cringey elements of the film is just the all-around misogyny from the male characters in the movie, it was never heavy handed or played out simply to make you hate the characters like when misogyny is added into today’s films, it was just the way male-female relationships tended to work in 1954 so you have to actively remember when this movie was made as you’re watching it and just take it for what it is. It did however make it harder to like or care about our lead character LB Jefferies. I don’t know if at the time this movie came out he was meant to be written or seen as a wild adventurous rebel who was too busy living his life to be tied down, but he just came off as a dick that was incapable of change and didn’t know how to treat a woman for the majority of the runtime, until Lisa (Kelly) proved herself to him and made him realize she was down for adventure as well. As much as I like and respect Jimmy Stewart as an actor, the women stole the show for me in this movie, Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter ate up the screen when they were involved and were my favorite overall characters, as Lisa and Stella respectably. Lisa came off as a boss woman in an era there wasn’t many of them, had her own job and money, and could get basically anything she wanted, besides the one thing she truly wanted, Jefferies. But even then, she could have had her choice of any man, and she chose to stick around and try to work down Jefferies because it was a challenge and it wasn’t easy, and when the time called for it she was more than down for the adventure and to do the heavy lifting that Jefferies couldn’t to help solve the mystery. Ritter’s Stella had the most detailed and gruesome descriptions of murder in the movie, while also being easily the funniest and most quotable character.
This isn’t my favorite Hitchcock film. I’m a big Norman Bates and Psycho fan and it’s one of my overall favorite movies ever so I don’t see any Hitchcock work ever topping that one, but this was still expertly shot and acted and a solid mystery story. As I said this movie is certainly a slow burn and takes a long while to really get going as we set our characters up. A lot of casual movie viewers today would probably get bored before things ever started to pick up, hell I’m no better, there was certainly times I was feeling a bit antsy and checking how far into the movie I was. But I think that’s just the way movies typically were shot back in the day, that’s certainly the way Hitchcock shot films, and can’t be held up to today’s standards. Modernly, we have uber short attention spans and a need for immediate gratification *cough* looking at your smartphones *cough* but that wasn’t the case back then and this gives us a better chance to get established with our core characters and for the actors to show off their chops and live in the character for a bit before things pick up. The last 20 minutes or so of this movie were enthralling though. The building suspense that you felt coming to a head and the eventual showdown between our characters were played out masterfully and gave the viewers exactly what they wanted and were hoping for throughout the movie. No need to leave us wanting more with Hitchcock, the man is known for his full and complete one-off stories, and this was no different. Overall, this movie had its flaws and cringes for me personally, but I can’t ever be down on a Hitchcock work. The acting, cinematography, setting, and overall mystery made this movie definitely worth the viewing, and it’s not hard for me to see why this is still seen as a classic, respected, and often imitated piece of American cinema.
