Hitch's greatest film

Rating: Null/10 (1 February 2001)

This is the master director's greatest film, slightly edging out "North by Northwest" and "Vertigo." Even the absence of a score by Bernard Herrmann cannot dim this masterpiece. Everything comes together in a seamless whole. To begin with, the set is impressive. The fact that the viewers are seeing so much happening in so many different people's lives makes them forget that, except for one or two scenes near the end, the camera never moves from the protagonist's apartment. What Jeff sees we see and nothing more. The voyeuristic fantasy is so complete, we forget that no one in his or her right mind would put on a brassiere, attempt suicide, or commit murder in front of an open window. I can't help wondering whether this looking in on so many people's private goings-on had anything to do with the still new medium of television, which enabled people for the first time to sit in the comfort of their own living rooms and watch, as if through an open window, the antics of Lucy and Ricky, Ozzie and Harriet and others in the supposed privacy of their own homes.
I mentioned the score. This film apparently marked Hitch's last collaboration with composer Franz Waxman, who scored the earliest of the director's American films, including "Rebecca" and "Suspicion." Yet it's not a conventional score. Apart from the opening theme, the music is part of the action and pours out of various apartments overlooking the courtyard, particularly the penthouse apartment of the songwriter, whose evolving composition provides a melodic--and sometimes not so melodic--backdrop for the developing plot. (What a noisy place! And this was in the days before boom boxes. Yet somehow it looks like a delightful neighbourhood to live in.)
Then, of course, there are the three stars, Stewart, Kelly and Ritter, who are wonderful together. In many respects all three are character actors, but the characters blend in so charming a fashion that the viewer is taken in as much by the personalities as by the suspense-filled story line. Each character is surrounded by a certain ironic twist. Stewart is the adventurer whose wanderlust is forcibly curtailed by confinement to a wheelchair. Kelly is the pampered socialite who nevertheless summons up the courage to collect clues to a suspected murder in a most unconventional way. And Ritter is an apparently ordinary insurance company nurse whose homespun wisdom makes her part psychoanalyst and part clairvoyant. The chemistry is marvellous and would be difficult to replicate.
What about the 1998 made-for-television remake? It's interesting enough entertainment in its own right, but not as a remake of the 1954 film. The original is definitely the one to see.