Doot, Doot, Doot, Looking Out His Backdoor

Rating: 8/10 (22 December 2004)

While recovering from a nasty leg injury, James Stewart finds himself looking out the back window of his apartment. Grace Kelly just wishes he'd look at her. Thelma Ritter wonders what's so special outside worth looking at. Raymond Burr wishes James looked at Miss Torso a little longer.
Alfred Hitchcock's directorial prowess is on full display in "Rear Window," a film that IMDb viewers have made the 14th best in movie history. Not to burst your bubble, but Hitch made better flicks than this, like "Psycho," "Vertigo," "Strangers On A Train," "The 39 Steps," and my all-time Hitchcock favorite, "Shadow Of A Doubt." But "Rear Window" is a hard film not to like, especially after you've seen it once or twice. The format is special, if not unique by Hitchcock standards, where we have a very controlled, limited setting, a man's Greenwich Village apartment that faces a courtyard and a number of apartment windows into various neighbors' lives. Think "Lifeboat," "Rope," or "Dial M For Murder," only more varied. Instead of the people on the main set facing danger, they see apparent danger in a neighbor's dwelling, and sip adult beverages and chew fancy dinners while contemplating how to respond.
Making it more special is the fact Stewart and Kelly do much of the thinking. Stewart's L.B. Jeffries is the main character, a bored photographer of some repute laid up by an injury he suffered while covering an auto race. Kelly as Lisa Carol Fremont is the high-profile, haute couture model used to wearing $1,100 gowns (in 1954!) and dining at Manhattan's 21 Club, but somehow willing to settle for Stewart amid all the Prince Rainier and Zoolander types she undoubtedly comes across.
However absurd, the central relationship is cemented by an apparent murder Jeffries thinks he witnesses, and Fremont comes to believe he did, involving a neighbor and his nagging wife. It's a bit of an irony, and a pretty marvelous one, that has Hitchcock celebrate one impeding marriage by making them apparent vultures in the untimely demise of another. Such was Hitchcock.
Great Greenwich Village ambiance, circa the early 1950s and "My Sister Eileen/Wonderful Town" rather than the drag queens and Stonewall riots of the near future. Boho artists co-exist with Miss Lonelyhearts-spinster types and costume jewelry salesmen that may be up to something more sinister, or not.
I wasn't a fan of Grace Kelly until that shot of her in Thorwald's apartment looking out the window while holding the purse upside down. Now I think she's swell. Thelma Ritter seems to have dropped in from a Neil Simon comedy next door, but she totally rules the scenes she's in. The set design, and the peeks at the neighbors, is especially well-wrought. That scene when Stewart and Miss Lonelyhearts share a silent, sad toast across the courtyard is one of cinema's finest moments.
While the mystery itself is kind of hokey and patly resolved, there's something special in the way it comes together on screen. It's one of Hitchcock's best meetings of comedy and suspense, and a great romance besides despite an early handicap (a beautiful, successful woman totally devoted to the leading man.) There's nothing to really dislike in this film, and while it's still not Hitch's best despite what all the IMDb voters say, it's a good-enough standard bearer for the best director cinema's ever known.