Sweating the details with the Master

Rating: 10/10 (7 September 2003)

It was Fred Astaire who discovered that you have to photograph dancers with a static camera because dancers move and a moving camera reduces movement. Most of Alfred Hitchcock's films, (although not all: see ROPE) are like a game of billiards. The characters are like billiard balls moving all over the table and colliding with each other until they all meet at the finale. But here the camera is static and it is the world that moves. What comes out is not simply the story, but all the details- all the stories. The result is a moment in time- a few days in the courtyard of a New York City apartment building in the sweaty summer of 1954- captured forever and most vividly. How many details and how many human stories do you see in FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, SABOTEUR, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH or NORTH BY NORTHWEST? Just the one. When you watch those films you are in an audience in a theater, watching a story played out on the screen. Here you see it all. You are in the movie. Remembering REAR WINDOW is like remembering something that you witnessed yourself- something that actually happened to you, not just a movie you watched. The result is not just Hitchcock's greatest film but one of the greatest films ever made.
The marvelous detail of this film is just amazing. Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly are legends of the cinema and Thelma Ritter, Wendell Corey and Raymond Burr are actor's actors. But the real star is the set, a world unto itself. And the photography of that set, all that was needed to allow us to see into the rooms clearly- it's amazing stuff, (the lighting needed was so hot it set off the sprinkler system). But even better than that is the sound. It's not all just flat on the soundtrack, like actors in a dubbing session. Like good radio drama, it recognizes that people who are some distance away sound different. The voices coming from across the courtyard are just perfectly done and do more than even the camera work to `put you there'.

The musical score for this film is not a film score at all- it's the music of these people, also heard across the courtyard. We hear the composer composing his song. We don't hear him doing it in five minutes, as we have heard in all the musicals. Instead it evolves over time. The dramatic piano cords he plays underscore the drama to come. We also hear some opera music that does the same. Everyone seems to have their own music-everyone except Thorwald, the murderer. And what a brilliant touch it is to make the murder a pathetic man, instead of some brilliant mastermind. In the end, he is one of us, as well, in a twisted way.
I can't think of another movie that creates a world so vivid for the audience to live in. ROPE was strictly about the action in the apartment. The view out the window is just a painted backdrop. Maybe a better comparison could me made to DEAD END, but as good as that film it's not really the same. Our perspective changes too much. Perhaps my favorite scene in REAR WINDOW is the one moment, (seconds, really), the perspective does change. It's when Jefferies is struggling with Thorwald and everyone in the apartment house looks in the direction of his apartment for a change. Now there's a twist!