A Redundant But Insightful Reflection On Rear Window

Rating: 10/10 (2 September 2008)

I am sitting here wondering why I am commenting on Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. It is a definitive classic of enduring interest, quality, and style. The last sentence is as redundant as this review will be. I mean, what can I say that not only hasn't already been said but isn't already known? Its masterful voyeuristic cinematography, its impeccably atmospheric sound and John Michael Hays's screen adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's short story have been quite sufficiently recognized over the past half century. I suppose there is one thing that people don't tend to think about, or at least it is one thing I haven't heard anyone say, and that is that Rear Window is a virtuoso portrait the human element of privacy, and feeling naked when we notice that it is invaded. What's more, that invasion is another element of human nature: Voyeurism.
What else is left to debate for incessantly lovable Jimmy Stewart, a successful photographer whose restlessness takes him all over the world and into situations where he takes pictures no one else gets, recuperating from a broken leg during a scorching hot summer? Here is a restless daredevil who makes a living with his eyes, laid up in a wheelchair in a small, apartment. This is 1954. He's not going to sit at the computer and blast people on IMDb message boards. He does what any one of his neighbors could be found doing in his situation: Alleviating boredom by spying on the lives of his neighbors. Furthermore, his view is perfect! Through his rear window, he can see into the building across the courtyard of the complex and glimpse from front row seats the residents' daily routines. There's the ubersexy dancer who exercises in her underwear, the couple who sleep on their small balcony because they don't have air conditioning, a lonely woman who lives by herself (who alternately gains great sympathy from us and generates cruel laughs at her expense; true to the spirit of voyeurism), and a frustrated songwriter always at his piano. And, there is the salesman, a pitch-perfect Raymond Burr, who lives directly across the courtyard from Jimmy Stewart, the one with the pesky, harassing invalid wife.
I can safely assume that nearly everyone who reads this generally knows the gist of the plot. It is a fine plot, ever condusive to everything Hitchcock. What is so significant about it to me is how it takes two seemingly conflicting sides of human nature and turns the suspenseful corner by dangling by a thread the inevitable, which is that an everyday person, no matter how fixed they are in their day-by-day algorithms, just may eventually discover that feeling of nakedness, of intrusion.
Though there are films by Hitchcock that I favor more, like The Lady Vanishes, Shadow of a Doubt, and Rope, Rear Window stands as pure cinema: Blatantly and shamelessly visual, full of layers of audible details from the ambient to deafening.