Rear Window starts slow but is rewarding in the end.

Rating: 7/10 (1 March 2004)

Rear Window

Picture this: You're all alone in your apartment, dancing in your underwear when you suddenly stop cold. The little hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, and you get the feeling that someone is watching you dance the night away through your window. Well, before you call the cops and tell them you have a peeping tom, why don't you wave at them because your peeping tom just might be...Jimmy Stewart.

Yes, Jimmy Stewart likes to look through peoples windows when they're in their underwear in the movie `Rear Window'. And to tell you the truth, he does a pretty good job of it too. Jimmy played a character named Jeff who was confined to a wheelchair in his apartment as a result of a broken leg. He was perfectly cynical, and his idleness, and curiosity of other people's private world was his downfall. Jeff was like a stereotypical house wife who gets caught up in their `stories', or soap operas. Jeff was becoming more and more absorbed in the private worlds outside of his rear window until he was finally sucked into that world in the shocking conclusion. Jimmy Stewart played this character with strength and established Jeff's cynicism, stubbornness and his meddlesome tendencies.
But the viewer wasn't always paying attention to Jimmy and his paranoia, because there was often times something a little easier on the eyes on the screen. The beautiful Grace Kelly played opposite of Jimmy Stewart. Even though her beauty was undeniable, she was more hypnotic than anything else. It was in the way she delivered her lines with such, dare I say, grace. Her parents weren't kidding when they named her after beauty.

Hitchcock used his resources to create beauty in every frame that appealed to all five senses and most emotions also. And even more amazing is how he filmed the whole movie out of the little apartment, and made it both an interesting story which built to a fantastic crescendo, but his cinematic genius was also stimulating to the mind. Hitchcock created visual metaphors of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs and of basic, raw humanity. He accomplished this with his set that had a apartment building that symbolized the human state, with the rock bottom sad people in the lower apartments and the happy people in the top floor apartments.

Hitchcock's film `Rear Window' had many levels much like his metaphorical apartment building. And from every angle there was something to appreciate in this movie. It captured beauty, it captured humanity, it reflected raw and polished life. `Rear Window' is in every sense of the word `art'.