Enforced Idleness

Rating: 9/10 (30 December 2005)

Alfred Hitchcock's second film with James Stewart is the story of Stewart's enforced idleness due to a broken leg. He's an active man, a news photographer, who constantly pushes himself into dangerous situations to get a picture and got a broken leg incidentally. Idleness for him is sure torture.
Fortunately or unfortunately as things turn out he has a Greenwich Village apartment with a Rear Window that allows him to look on the neighbors across the courtyard. It's like watching about 15 different soap operas at once. And with his photographic equipment including a zoom telephoto lens, Stewart gets himself involved with the various soap opera plots.
Stewart also has a girl friend in Grace Kelly who is playing a part that is really no stretch for her, a Park Avenue chic and rich woman who's really had quite a life of comfort. Stewart doesn't think she's ready for his kind of life and they have a running quarrel.
That is until Stewart puts some conclusions together from observing one of the apartments and he thinks that salesman Raymond Burr has killed his wife. Although he can't convince his detective friend Wendell Corey, he does slowly convince Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter his nurse of the validity of his conclusions.
Everyone here does a creditable job, but I think the best performance comes from Raymond Burr. Burr, who played a lot of villains on the screen, usually plays them tough and mean. Hitchcock did a superb job in getting a performance of a really frightened man. Seeing the story of Burr and his wife through Stewart's eyes, it's the story of two very ordinary people apparently mismatched. Up until the last 15 minutes of Rear Window, we see Burr at a distance like the rest of Stewart's soap operas. When we do see him up close we find a very ordinary, but frightened man. It's his very ordinariness that makes Burr so frightening. The audience sees themselves in him, could we commit murder if sufficiently pushed hard enough?
I suppose if James Stewart had a broken leg in 2005 and was laid up that way, he'd be busy on his personal computer and wouldn't have time to be looking across the courtyard. Televisions were still a luxury item in 2005. My grandparents still didn't have one at that date. Today Stewart could get all the afternoon soap opera action he wanted.
A remake of Rear Window was done in 1998 with Christopher Reeve. Of course the difference is that Reeve was a paraplegic and dealing with a real and permanent situation on film and in his life. It was a whole new kind of Rear Window.
Rear Window has all the elements one expects from Hitchcock, thrilling plot, witty and sophisticated dialog and a wry conclusion to it all. A very enjoyable film.