Rear Window, Forward Cinema

Rating: 9/10 (9 May 2020)

Why on earth a man, heterosexual and still relatively young, would spend his time looking out of his window when in his rooms there is a woman like Grace Kelly could be the real mystery left after watching Rear Window, the 1954 masterpiece directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Besides this cheeky and impudent question, this is really a masterpiece, one of the films most loved by his director and one of his more sophisticated, both narratively as well as cinematographically. Loosely based on a relatively unknown 1942 short story written by Cornell Woolrich, It Had to Be Murder, Rear Window sees L.B. Jefferies, a successful photo reporter played with enough confidence and progressive involvement by James Stewart, confined in his New York small apartment with a broken and plastered leg. In the sweltering summer heat, he turns and focuses his attention and lenses to the neighbouring apartments facing his condo's backyard, observing them with a fast growing interest that rapidly becomes excited voyeurism when he starts suspecting that a uxoricide took place in an opposite flat. Albeit reluctantly, also his beautiful fiancée Lisa, a Grace Kelly whose first appearance in the film is one of the most esthetically captivating close ups in movies history and fully justifies the hot ice nickname given to her allegedly by Alfred Hitchcock, as well as both the solid, down to earth nurse Stella, caustically played by a vitriolic Thelma Ritter, and the reluctant detective Tom Doyle, a fairly stolid Wendell Corey full of banal common sense, are drawn into his obsession with what neighbour Lars Thorwald, an imposing Raymond Burr, might or might not have done to his nagging wife.
The opening credits reveal straight away one of the movie's multiple codes, when the curtains of James raise to reveal the fixed scene of the coming attraction, the very same back yard where all flats look into. From then on, a static journey begins that reverses many established principles of the 50s filmmaking: the main character does not move, all the other, secondary casts actually play in front of him. The viewer, barring a short yet important moment when James Stewart falls asleep, has the same point of view of the protagonist, sees and interprets the story through the eyes and expressions of him. The soundtrack comes from within the movie, mostly heard from one of the apartments where a musician is living.
All these filmic and narrative details, together with the crafted and perfect jigsaw of which each apartment and neighbours' live is a piece, are added to the self-conscious study of voyeurism and the essential role of cinema to make an essential film, where no shot, no dialogue is redundant, and an evergreen masterpiece, at the same time celebrating and subverting the Hollywood's codes.
This is not the only Hitchcock's movie constructed in a theatrical form, but in no other the British master was able to extremize with such genius and depth of analysis the intertwined relationships between the eye and the mind, mixing like an esoteric alchemist obsessions and humor, suspense and sexuality, flashing light and silent darkness, individuality and collectivity, reality and perceptions.
Peeping Toms of the world, unite!