by Alfred Hitchcock, 1954.
Starring: Raymond Burr, Wendell Corey, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, James Stewart.
Rating: 8.5/10, 9/10.
Hitchcock movies don’t usually scare me, and I don’t actually think they’re usually supposed to. I mean, I guess Psycho, say, and The Birds are meant to be scary, but for the most part I think he’s wrongly got that reputation.
That said, I watched Rear Window at a friend’s house and then walked across campus back to my room. It was late at night (getting into early morning), it was rainy, it was windy, there were random creepy noises, and I was scared out of my mind. The "original trailer" (kindly included on the video) said something like "if you aren’t scared...you’re not alive!" and gosh, I think it’s true.
It seems like pretty much everyone knows the story, but I’ll recap it briefly anyway in order to fill space, mostly because I don’t know what to say. L.B. Jeffries (Stewart) is a professional photographer who just broke his leg while photographing a car race, and so he’s stuck in his apartment, with just his incredibly spunky nurse Stella (Ritter), his "too perfect" girlfriend Lisa (Kelly), and spying on the neighbors to keep him occupied. He comes up with names for the neighbors across the courtyard—Miss Lonelyhearts, who mimes romantic dinners with nonexistant men before collapsing into tears, or Miss Torso, who regularly hosts parties with just her and large bunches of men. One day, he sees some events that may or may not indicate that one of the neighbors, a Lars Thorvald (Raymond Burr, of all people), has casually offed his wife and taken bits of her body out of the apartment to...somewhere. Stella and Lisa are skeptical at first, though the more they watch, the more they believe. So they call in a friend of Mr. Jeffries, one Thomas Doyle (Corey), a detective, but he insists that it is all in their minds and that there must be a perfectly reasonable explanation—though he admits that he can’t think of any.
None of this, I must point out, is particularly scary. Rear Window is a perfect example of the decline of the American Movie. It takes most of its length to build up suspense and mystery, and only in the last...oh, say, twenty minutes of the film does it take all of that weight it’s built up and drop it. This is, of course, the part where they contrive to get Thorvald out of his apartment and Lisa actually goes in and starts sneaking around, Jeffries watching from his wheelchair, helpless. In modern "scary" movies, we’re just frightened by physical shocks—mad slashers jumping out of bushes, that sort of thing. Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy those movies just as much as anyone else, but when that’s all I get, I feel...starved, I guess is the right word. Cheated, too.
Of course, because this is Hitchcock, the direction is incredible. The moral of THIS story is that frame shots are cool. The many sequences where we observe from Jeffries’s point of view as he moves his gaze from one window to another, in long, unbroken shots, are fabulous. And with that, my store of imitation film knowledge runs out, and I end the review.
read roger ebert's essay on rear window