Looking at Urban Life ... through binoculars and voyeurism

Rating: 10/10 (18 September 2007)

Some of Alfred Hitchcock's films date badly, or are flawed by script points he chose to ignore as "Maguffins", or just are not his cup of tea. But REAR WINDOW is one great movie - a film that just never stops fascinating it's audiences as much as the world of that Greenwich Village enclave fascinates L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart).
Hitchcock built a meticulous set of apartment flats with a common courtyard. Although extensive it is, in fact, claustrophobic, with the seemingly separate lives of the residents running into each other more frequently than one expects (witness Raymond Burr's growling at a neighbor as he is working on his garden patch and she tries to give him some advice). The fact that it is supposed to be in the middle of a heat wave (this is in the pre-air-conditioned apartment days) adds to the feelings of closing in - even if the audience actually feels no heat from the set. At least five separate stories are going on that we are invited into during the course of the film, besides the main one of the fate of Mrs. Anna Thorwald (Irene Winston).
Jeff has been a widely respected and awarded photographer around the world, and he is nursing a broken leg (from his photographing a careening racing car). His only contacts with the outside world are his nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter) and his girlfriend Lisa Carol Fremont (Grace Kelly) who is a supermodel of the period (c. 1954). Stuck with nothing to do Jeff starts looking out his window at his neighbors. They include a ballet dancer, a newlywed couple, a struggling pianist composer, a lonely woman seeking companionship, a couple with a dog, and a sculptor. Also there is Mr. Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), a salesman, and his wife Anna.
Voyeurism is intoxicating, because (as long as you are unobserved) you can imagine what is actually going on - illustrated by the newlyweds pulling down the blinds of their window, and Steward struggling for words to explain to Kelly about what the couple behind the blinds are doing. But it becomes a matter that we are increasingly urgent as Jeff is aware of what is going on in the lives of those people. In particular the Thorwalds, who are always arguing.
One night he hears a woman scream, and wonders who it could be. Then he notices Thorwald acting very methodically (and atypically) in leaving his apartment with his salesman bag at late hours of the night. He slowly concentrates on Thorwald and his movements in his apartment - and the fact that the hitherto bedridden wife is missing. Both Stella and Lisa dismiss this, until they both are unconsciously drawn into watching some of Thorwald's activities themselves, and they start realizing there is something a bit odd.
Jeff calls in a war friend of his, Police Detective Thomas Doyle (Wendell Corey) and he to is rather dismissive, but checks into the story. And he finds that everything on the surface seems explicable. But despite occasionally making Stewart and Kelly ashamed of themselves, sooner or later some other business by Thorwald or near his abode reawakens suspicions.
The conclusion is memorable for giving Thorwald an opportunity to confront his main prosecutor and demand an ethics answer that just can't be simply answered.
Hitchcock appears to have used elements of the Crippen murder for the story - based by the way on a short story by the gifted noir writer Cornell Woolrich. The cast is splendid, not only giving a bravura performance to Steward, but giving Kelly a chance to stretch her acting when in danger, and giving Ritter another one of her wise, wizened women roles. Burr had his best recalled moments on film here - if not his best performance (I still favor his avenging D.A. in A PLACE IN THE SUN). Corey too is the voice of reason and common sense - until the last moments of the film when Stewart finally jars him.
One of the finest thrillers ever constructed and filmed by a master director