Good movie, but not a masterpiece

Rating: 9/10 (23 July 2008)

I had a relatively blah rating of Rear Window on here a couple years back, and now I am compelled to re-write my review. You might say that that is the sign of a good movie, something that continues to get better over time. The brilliance of Rear Window is in two things.
The first is the fact that it is incredibly hard to be bored by it, as there are several plot lines going on at once. Obviously the two ones we are most drawn towards are the one of two main characters and the one of the murderer, but there are also 4 more linear plots going on at all the other windows. They are all realistic as well. Even though realistic plots is a staple of Hitchcock films, Rear Window almost seems more realistic than most Hitchcock films.
The second reason it is a masterpiece is the viewpoint. Roger Ebert addresses this in his review, but we are given the viewpoint of Jeffries while he looks at his neighbors. This highlights another Hitchcock staple, his ability to make the audience relate to people that we should not be relating to. If we were looking at the story from the third person then we might look down on Jeffries, but since it is in the first person we naturally downplay the creepiness of Jeffries' actions because we inherently think that we are doing it as well.