Rear Window

Rear Window

Like the Greenwich Village courtyard view from its titular portal, Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window is both confined and multileveled: both its story and visual perspective are dictated by its protagonist's imprisonment in his apartment, convalescing in a wheelchair, from which both he and the audience observe the lives of his neighbors. Cheerful voyeurism, as well as the behavior glimpsed among the various tenants, affords a droll comic atmosphere that gradually darkens when he sees clues to what may be a murder. Photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart) is, in fact, a voyeur by trade, a professional photographer sidelined by an accident while on assignment. His immersion in the human drama (and comedy) visible from his window is a by-product of boredom, underlined by the disapproval of his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), and a wisecracking visiting nurse (Thelma Ritter). Yet when the invalid wife of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) disappears, Jeff enlists the two women to help him to determine whether she's really left town, as Thorwald insists, or been murdered. Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto convincingly argues that the crime at the center of this mystery is the MacGuffin--a mere pretext--in a film that's more interested in the implications of Jeff's sentinel perspective. We actually learn more about the lives of the other neighbors (given generic names by Jeff, even as he's drawn into their lives) he, and we, watch undetected than we do the putative murderer and his victim. Jeff's evident fear of intimacy and commitment with the elegant, adoring Lisa provides the other vital thread to the script, one woven not only into the couple's own relationship, but reflected and even commented upon through the various neighbors' lives. At minimum, Hitchcock's skill at making us accomplices to Jeff's spying, coupled with an ingenious escalation of suspense as the teasingly vague evidence coalesces into ominous proof, deliver a superb thriller spiked with droll humor, right up to its nail-biting, nightmarish climax. At deeper levels, however, Rear Window plumbs issues of moral responsibility and emotional honesty, while offering further proof (were any needed) of the director's brilliance as a visual storyteller. --Sam Sutherland

Genre: Mystery, Thriller
Director(s): Alfred Hitchcock
Production: Paramount Pictures
  Nominated for 4 Oscars. Another 6 wins & 8 nominations.
 
IMDB:
8.5
Metacritic:
100
Rotten Tomatoes:
100%
PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Year:
1954
115
28,018 Views
Suspense of screaming proportions!
See It! - If your nerves can stand it after Psycho!
The most unusual and intimate journey into human emotions ever filmed !
It only takes one witness to spoil the perfect crime.
Seeing isn't always believing.
In deadly danger...Because they saw too much!

Stella:
I got a nose for trouble. I can smell it ten miles away...I can smell trouble right here in this apartment. First you smash your leg. Then you get to lookin' out the window. See things you shouldn't see. Trouble. I can see you in court now, surrounded by a bunch of lawyers in double-breasted suits. You're pleading: 'Judge, it was only a little bit of innocent fun. I love my neighbors like a father.' And the Judge says, 'Well, congratulations, you've just given birth to three years in Dannemora.'

Jeff:
Yeah, right now I'd welcome trouble...You know, I think you're right. I think there is going to be trouble around here.

Stella:
...What kind of trouble?

Jeff:
Lisa Fremont.

Stella:
Are you kidding? She's a beautiful young girl and you're a reasonably healthy young man.

Jeff:
She expects me to marry her.

Stella:
That's normal.

Jeff:
I don't want to.

Stella:
That's abnormal.

Jeff:
I'm just not ready for marriage.

Stella:
Every man's ready for marriage when the right girl comes along. And Lisa Fremont is the right girl for any man with half a brain who can get one eye open.

Jeff:
Oh, she's all right.

Stella:
What did you do? Have a fight?

Jeff:
No.

Stella:
Her father loading up the shotgun?

Jeff:
What? Please, Stella.

Stella:
It's happened before you know. Some of the world's happiest marriages have, uh, started under the gun, as you might say.

Jeff:
No, she's just not the girl for me.

Stella:
Yeah, she's only perfect.

Jeff:
She's too perfect. She's too talented, she's too beautiful. She's too sophisticated. She's too everything but what I want.

Stella:
Is, um, what you want something you can discuss?

Jeff:
Well, it's very simple, Stella. She belongs to that rarified atmosphere of Park Avenue, you know. Expensive restaurants, literary cocktail parties...Can you imagine her tramping around the world with a camera bum who never has more than a week's salary in the bank? If she was only ordinary.

Stella:
You ever gonna get married?

Jeff:
I'll probably get married one of these days, and when I do, it's gonna be to someone who thinks of life not just as a new dress, and a lobster dinner, the latest scandal. I need a woman who's willing...to go anywhere and do anything and love it. So the honest thing for me to do is just to call the whole thing off and let her find somebody else.

Stella:
Yeah, I can hear you now. Get out of my life. You're a perfectly wonderful woman - you're too good for me. Look, Mr. Jefferies, I'm not an educated woman, but I can tell you one thing. When a man and a woman see each other and like each other they ought to come together - wham! Like a couple of taxis on Broadway, not sit around analyzing each other like two specimens in a bottle.

Jeff:
There's an intelligent way to approach marriage.

Stella:
Intelligence! Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence. Hah! Modern marriage!

Jeff:
Did you ever get shot at? Did you ever get run over? Did you ever get sandbagged at night because somebody got unfavorable publicity from your camera? Did you ever...those high-heels, they'll be great in the jungle and the nylons and those six ounce lingerie...

Lisa:
Three!

Jeff:
All right. Three! They'll make a big hit in Finland just before you freeze to death?

Lisa:
Well, if there's one thing I know, it's how to wear the proper clothes.

Jeff:
Yeah, yeah. Well try and find a raincoat in Brazil, even when it isn't raining. Lisa. In this job, you carry one suitcase, your home is the available transportation. You don't sleep very much, you bathe less, and sometimes the food that you eat is made from things that you couldn't even look at when they're alive.

Lisa:
Jeff, you don't have to be deliberately repulsive just to impress me I'm wrong.

Jeff:
Deliberately repulsive! I'm just trying to make it sound good. You just have to face it, Lisa, you're not meant for that kind of a life. Few people are.

Lisa:
You're too stubborn to argue with.

Jeff:
I'm not stubborn - I'm just truthful.

Lisa:
I know, a lesser man would have told me it was one long holiday - and I would have been awakened to a rude disillusionment.

Jeff:
Oh, well now, wait a minute. Now wait a minute. If you want to get vicious on this, I'll be very happy to accommodate you.

Lisa:
No, I don't particularly want that. [She rises and moves away.] So that's it. You won't stay here and I can't go with you.

Jeff:
It would be the wrong thing.

Lisa:
You don't think either one of us could ever change?

Jeff:
Right now, it doesn't seem so.

Lisa:
[preparing to leave] I'm in love with you. I don't care what you do for a living. I'd just like to be part of it somehow. It's deflating to find out the only way I can be part of it is to take out a subscription to your magazine. I guess I'm not the girl I thought I was.

Jeff:
There's nothing wrong with you, Lisa. You've got this town in the palm of your hand.

Lisa:
Not quite it seems. Goodbye, Jeff. [She turns and starts for the doorway]

Jeff:
You mean, 'Good night.'

Lisa:
I mean what I said.

Jeff:
Well, Lisa, couldn't we just, uh, couldn't we just keep things status quo?

Lisa:
Without any future?

Jeff:
Well, when am I gonna see you again?

Lisa:
Not for a long time...[pause]...at least not until tomorrow night.

Lt. Doyle:
Lars Thorwald is no more a murderer than I am.

Jeff:
You mean to say you can explain everything that's gone on over there and is still going on?

Lt. Doyle:
No, and neither can you. That's a secret, private world you're looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private that they couldn't possibly explain in public.

Lisa:
Like disposing of their wives.

Lt. Doyle:
Get that idea out of your mind. It will only lead in the wrong direction.

Jeff:
What about the knife and the saw?

Lt. Doyle:
Did you ever own a saw?

Jeff:
At home in the garage, I had...

Lt. Doyle:
How many people did you cut up with it? Or with the couple of hundred knives you probably owned in your life? Your logic is backward.

Lisa:
You can't ignore the wife disappearing and the trunk and the jewelry.

Lt. Doyle:
I checked the railroad station. He bought a ticket. Ten minutes later, he put his wife on the train. Destination? Meritsville. The witnesses are that deep.

Lisa:
That might have been a woman, but it couldn't have been Mrs. Thorwald. That jewelry...

Lt. Doyle:
Look, Miss Fremont. That uh, feminine intuition stuff sells magazines but in real life, it's still a fairy tale. I don't know how many wasted years I've spent tracking down leads based on female intuition....

[Lisa goes into the kitchen]

Lt. Doyle:
[looking at Lisa's open overnight bag] Do you tell your landlord everything?

Jeff:
I told you to be careful, Tom.

Lt. Doyle:
If I'd have been careful piloting that reconnaissance plane during the war, you wouldn't have had the chance to take the pictures that won you a medal and a good job and fame and money.


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