Brilliant, Voyeuristic, Minimalistic, Darkly Humorous Murder Thriller

Rating: 7/10 (12 June 2007)

Photo-journalist L.B. Jefferies is recovering from a broken leg. Bored, he spends his time looking out his apartment window at the neighbours, and begins to suspect the salesman across the way of murdering his wife. Is he imagining things, or is there some foul play ?
As with so many of Hitchcock's films, this is a wonderful example of how to take an almost absurdly simple idea and spin out the maximum tension, character, humour and drama from it. It should be boring (a movie set in one room with a guy who can't move) and ludicrous (a killer who murders his wife and chops her up in front of his neighbours) but it's quite the opposite - riveting and eerily plausible. If ever there was a film about voyeurism and its relationship to cinema, this is it; Hitchcock tells engrossing little silent movies of the tenants (the newlyweds, the sculptress, Miss Torso, the dog-owners, the killer, the songwriter, Miss Lonelyhearts) without ever cheating and cutting to closeups of them - we see them all remotely, from Stewart's detached and aloof point of view. It's a masterpiece of editing, which builds and builds into a nail-biting final reel, with our hero sitting helplessly alone in the dark while the killer closes in. Stewart is wonderful as always as the sardonic prisoner, and is the only leading man not to fawn over Kelly, resulting in her best performance, while Ritter steals the show as Stewart's wisecracking nurse. Equally fabulous is the production design - contrary to appearances, the whole backyard neighbourhood was a very elaborate set on the Paramount backlot, one of the most memorable in any movie. An extremely influential picture, particularly on the career of Brian DePalma (see Body Double), with the helpless-witness motif appearing in many fine subsequent thrillers (Wait Until Dark, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Panic Room, etc), and a watershed of stylish, intelligent direction. Remade for TV by ABC in 1998 with Christopher Reeve in the lead. Based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich and deftly scripted by John Michael Hayes, who wrote Hitch's three subsequent films (notably the sublime The Trouble With Harry). Hitchcock appears in his standard cameo as the guy winding the clock in the songwriter's loft.