Habitat for Humanity

Rating: 9/10 (13 November 2007)

James Stewart, a prize-winning photographer, is cooped up in his Greenwich Village apartment with a broken leg. Bored, he watches his diverse neighbors around the courtyard. One of them, a salesman (Raymond Burr), seems to dispose of his nagging, invalid wife by chopping her up and removing her body in sections, but Stewart has no evidence. Gradually, he draws his nurse (Thelma Ritter) into his web of convictions, then his girl friend (Grace Kelly, than whom no girl friend is more gracious -- or better looking for that matter, all that nacreous beauty coiled around a soft pink core). But he is unable to convince his "ornery old friend", the police detective, Wendell Corey, that anything is wrong. The climax reveals Burr to be a murderer, breaks Stewart's other leg, and smooths over some riffs in the Stewart/Kelly relationship.
This is one of Hitchcock's best. It raises certain ethical questions, of course. Is it right for people to spy on one another? But the philosophical issues are minor compared to the virtues displayed by this film if taken as a simple mystery thriller. Everything comes together.
It's from Hitchcock's best period, the 1950s, and the director does a laudable job. But it's one of those movies that requires the services of a crew that really knows its business, and they deliver. The performances by the principals is excellent, especially Stewart, on whose smallest movements the story depends. But the movie wouldn't be the success that it is without Franz Waxman's score, Robert Burks' photography, Sam Comer and Ray Moyer's set decoration, and the Sound Department. These aren't the kind of crew members who get noticed, except among their peers, but they put together a winner in this instance.
Here's one example of what I mean. One of Stewart's neighbors, "Miss Lonelyhearts," lives alone and is given to having dinners with imaginary suitors. One night, after suitable preliminary libations, she goes out and picks up a younger man and brings him home. Instead of the decorous development of a romance, the testosterone-driven dude becomes aggressive and Miss Lonelyhearts must slap him to get him to stop. He leaves in a high dudgeon, or maybe, given the circumstances, a low dudgeon. Now, Stewart is watching this from his window across the courtyard. It's late evening and rather noisy. A pop song is playing somewhere. Stewart can't hear what's being said, and he can barely see the events through the half-closed blinds of Miss Lonelyhearts' apartment. Yet the sound of that slap registers, faintly but still audibly. It's the only clear sound we hear or need to hear from her apartment. It acts as punctuation, a period putting an end to this particular cardboard fantasy.
The set is functional and evocative. There are about two dozen windows around the courtyard and Stewart can see almost all of them. The less important apartments are off to the side so he must bend over, but the other are accessible. (It's mid summer and the temperature is in the 90s, so everyone's windows tend to be open.) The construction of the set even yields a tiny sliver of the street across the way, and, with the help of a telephoto lens, even an interior glimpse of the restaurant on the other side of the street. And events of varying importance occur in these tiny porticoes. A murderer may be seen toting body parts off in a suitcase, just for a few seconds, on the sidewalk, or a photographer's girl may give him the high sign when he sends her off on an errand.
The interior of Stewart's apartment is designed with precision. It's what I think is called a studio apartment -- just one room, not overly big, combining bedroom and dining room. There's a miniature kitchen off to the side, the interior of which we never see, and a bathroom, ditto. The place is cluttered with Stewart's memorabilia and other junk. How he can get around in that wheelchair amid the chaos we'll never know. If he had two functional legs he's STILL have to edge around sideways. And, man, do we get the feeling of heat, and of involvement with other people, so open and involved that they can't seem to get out of each other's way. That's why, when a miniature dog is strangled, and the owner across the courtyard screams out that nobody knows the meaning of "neighbor" anymore, it rings false. None can be unaware of his surroundings.
James Stewart is not a likable guy in this movie. He's edgy. He's superior, argumentative, neither invites nor projects warmth, is sometimes snotty to his visitors or even hostile. It's hard to imagine why his detective friend would have anything much to do with him. And he plays Grace Kelly like a hooked fish on a very light line. Kelly wants to get married and Stewart wants to keep things "status quo." She wants him to give up his adventurous, perambulatory life, wear dark flannel suits, and settle down to taking fashion portraits, which is definitely not his bliss. Kelly herself is always impeccably dressed, carries expensive luggage, and is perfectly satisfied with the comfortable life she leads among the social elite. At the end, in a consummately phony compromise, we see Stewart sleeping peacefully and smiling, the temperature now having dropped into the 70s, while Kelly sits curled on his couch and, after a glance at him, puts aside the book she's been pretending to read, "Beyond the High Himalayas", and takes up a copy of Harper's Bazaar. Can anyone believe that this marriage will be a happy one?
It's full of intrigue and suspense, finely done, and not to be missed. Not profound -- just "deep" enough.