Alfred Hitchcock (1954)

Based on a 1942 short story called It Had to Be Murder by Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window is an excellent idea and a very entertaining movie.  Photographer ‘Jeff’ Jeffries (James Stewart) is stuck in a wheelchair in his Greenwich Village apartment, his broken leg encased in plaster.  To stave off boredom and stir craziness, he watches what the various inhabitants of the block opposite are up to.  Jeff becomes convinced that one of them has done away with his wife but is he, in his anxiety to keep his mind active, imagining things?   His observation is enjoyable but it makes you a little queasy too – Jeff is a nosy neighbour verging on a peeping Tom.  This man, who makes a living taking pictures, uses binoculars but he might just as well be the man with a movie camera:  Hitchcock is cheerfully unashamed of his complicity with his protagonist – and his/Jeff’s focus on a semi-undressed blonde across the way has a particular charge (especially with Grace Kelly in the role of Jeff’s socialite girlfriend Lisa).  The company of neighbours becomes familiar to us rather in the way that neighbours really do, through seeing part of their routines, but with the vast difference that these are private routines:  Hitchcock reminds the audience that we too are voyeurs.  The dialogue by John Michael Hayes is crisp and clever and the scene-setting in Rear Window is Hitchcock at his amusing and inventive best.  The movement of the camera across the apartments (the DoP was Robert Burks) and the build-up of noise from the buildings, its environs and New York City not far beyond are alluring.  The many elements of the soundtrack are always in dynamic competition and there’s an abundance of eccentric visual details, like a dog going up and down the height of the apartment block in a Moses basket.  The film predates West Side Story by a few years but Franz Waxman’s score, heard at this distance in time, calls to mind the famous Leonard Bernstein music.

Rear Window is first-rate entertainment, even though it goes on a little too long and there’s not enough mystery to solve.  James Stewart makes a fine job of Jeff’s exasperated recuperation (especially when his plastered leg is itching) although there are signs and sounds here of the mannerisms that eventually turned Stewart into a caricature of himself.  Jeff’s exchanges with Thelma Ritter, as the insurance company nurse who comes to his apartment each day, are spot on – Ritter handles the lines superlatively.  As the main woman in Jeff’s life, Grace Kelly looks spectacular.  The sequence in which he voices his growing suspicions and Lisa keeps kissing him is a splendid example of how to get across information at the same time as you describe a relationship (and make an audience laugh).  Lisa is too otherwise engaged here to listen to what Jeff is saying, but we listen as well as watch.  Grace Kelly becomes rather tedious, though.  She botches the moment when suspicion dawns on Lisa and she generally seems too pleased with herself.   Her expression in the film’s final shot is especially irritating (and reminds you why Nicole Kidman will be well cast in the upcoming Kelly biopic).  The murderous neighbour is Raymond Burr in the days before he brought other killers to book as Perry Mason and, as Jeff Jeffries’ wheelchair reminds you, a man called Ironside.

10 June 2012