First-rate Hitch . . .

Rating: Null/10 (6 January 2015)

I consider myself a student of Hitchcock. His films are pure, with little confidence in symbols and egghead analysis. It is said that he treated his actors like cattle but the payoff is that he treated his audience like gold. He made his films for the public, he made them entertaining and he made films with characters that at least approximate human intelligence.
Rear Window is mounted on an idea of complete simplicity. A man is trapped in one location, an island – in this case, a wheelchair. Jimmy Stewart plays L.B. Jefferies – Jeff to his friends – a traveling photographer who is in a state of confinement after an accident. A brilliant tracking shot gives us the entirety of his predicament as we see his broken camera and a photo of an airborne racecar tumbling right at Jefferies' lens.
Jeff's days of confinement are spent staring out of his window, which like all others, are open due to the intense heat. He takes daily inventory of the tenants in the apartments across the tightly packed courtyard. His travels haven't given him much time to get to know his neighbors. There's the lady he calls Ms. Torso, a party girl who has a steady stream of gentlemen callers. There's the couple who live on the top floor who lower their dog in a basket to the garden below. There's Ms. Lonelyhearts, a sad spinster who has dinner with imaginary dates or gets dressed up to go to the restaurant across the street and pretend she's expecting someone. There are the newlyweds who pull the shade and rarely come up for air. There's the frustrated musician whose labor bears no fruit. And there's burly Mr. Thorwald who has an invalid wife and a marriage that seems to consist mainly of tolerance.
The habits of Jeff's neighbors become routine and then one day he notices that Mrs. Thorwald has disappeared. Later that night, he sees Mr. Thorwald wandering in and out of his apartment during a rainstorm. Jeff's curiosity centers on a few vital clues that lead him to believe that this man may have killed his wife. First comes a large suitcase, then the appearance of a saw, then a change in the arrangement of Thorwald's flowerbed.
Jeff's mounting suspicions come only from what he observes from his window. He's in a wheelchair so his visual plane is limited and Hitchcock never allows us to see anything that Jeff can't see. We become participants because Hitch puts us in the wheelchair with him. Close-ups are provided first through a large pair of binoculars, then through Jeff's telephoto lens which allows us to see with clarity. There is no musical score (the only music comes from the musician's apartment) so all of the sounds are natural. This allows the sounds coming from Thorwald's apartment to be muted so that we think we know what we are hearing, but we aren't sure. We strain to listen, to hear some hint of what is being said, but it is to no avail (closed captions don't help).
Jeff's state of immobility is the anchor of the story. Everything that Thorwald does seems to make sense if one just rationalizes it long enough. When he binds a trunk with heavy ropes and then has it picked up, we suspect that it contains his wife's body. When Mrs. Thorwald's purse appears in a window we suspect foul play because what woman would leave it behind? When Jeff's detective friend goes to investigate, he comes back with a very reasonable, rational explanation that punches a hole in all of the evidence. Yet we have been drawn in, and we have invested so much in Jeff's belief that we become a participant ourselves. Lisa (Grace Kelly), Jeff's gorgeous fiancé, and Stella (Thelma Ritter) his level-headed nurse, at first scold him for peeping on his neighbors but eventually they become participants themselves. They, in a sense, become our point of view, disgusted by what Jeff is doing but eventually curious.
This is a film of limited characters, and one of those characters is the setting itself. It is important that the set feel like an additional character. The courtyard and the building across the way create a feeling of tight, closed-in space. It was a brilliant touch to set the film in the heat of summer so that all those windows are opened so that we get the noise of each apartment and we are able to peer in on each tenant. We can't see the street on the other side, since it is obscured nor can we see the other tenements on Jeff's side of the building. We see only what we need to so the mystery is held in our minds just as it is in Jeff's mind.
Rear Window is Hitchcock at his best, toying with our expectations and then not only giving us what we expect but a great deal more. He is a puppeteer pulling the strings in such a way that the ending doesn't come as a surprise but doesn't come to any false conclusions. The final confrontation with Thorwald is not just tossed into the plot, it is built on everything we've seen before. Hitchcock famously said that he played his audience like a violin and with Rear Window, we like being played.