Hitchcock's Genius Delivers In Rear Window

Rating: 10/10 (1 November 2011)

Rear Window is an suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.It was written by John Michael Hayes that was based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder".The film stars James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, and Thelma Ritter.
Laid up with a broken leg, photojournalist L.B. Jeffries is confined to his tiny, sweltering courtyard apartment. To pass the time between visits from his nurse and his fashion model girlfriend Lisa, the binocular-wielding Jeffries stares through the rear window of his apartment at the goings-on in the other apartments around his courtyard. As he watches his neighbors, he assigns them such roles and character names as "Miss Torso",a professional dancer with a healthy social life or "Miss Lonelyhearts",a middle-aged woman who entertains nonexistent gentlemen callers. Of particular interest is seemingly mild-mannered traveling salesman Lars Thorwald, who is saddled with a nagging, invalid wife. One afternoon, Thorwald pulls down his window shade, and his wife's incessant bray comes to a sudden halt. Out of boredom, Jeffries casually concocts a scenario in which Thorwald has murdered his wife and disposed of the body in gruesome fashion. Trouble is, Jeffries' musings just might happen to be the truth.
Rear Window is arguably the second best film of Alfred Hitchcock next to Vertigo.The new-of-a-kind movie during its year of release makes a murder mystery tense as well as entertaining.In it,Hitchcock's genius delivers as one of the most elegant entertainments ever made in Hollywood, and also one of the boldest and most personal of the his films since it is a work that's almost perverse in its giddy celebration of the thrill of voyeurism.