A voyeuristic masterpiece of style and storytelling

Rating: 10/10 (30 March 2010)

Rear Window (1954)
Director Alfred Hitchcock's movies have almost always cut against one of the strongest currents in American Cinema: complete verisimilitude. Even some of his masterpieces, like North by Northwest, Vertigo, or Psycho use montage, special lighting effects, and backprojection to break out of pure believable film-making. But it's intentional. It's part of the experience of watching a movie, like watching a play, that reminds you that you are a viewer, and the movie is a separate thing, a work of art, or stretch of celluloid in a can.
He even presses this point in every film by inserting himself in the movie. How can you not notice the director winking, as if to say, don't forget, this is all a big game.
Rear Window makes intentional artifice the defining aesthetic of the entire shoot. And now wonderful it all works. Yes, we can totally accept it all, somehow. The events are unusual, but not unbelievable, and the acting is candid and remarkably nuanced with everyday expressions. Jimmy Stewart in particular is amazing as the wheelchair bound photographer with nothing to do but look at the neighbors in around the courtyard, but Thelma Ritter is also in top form, quirky but in a lovable, not distracting, way.
The rest, outside, is all theater. We see with uncanny perfection what is happening through all these apartment windows, and so there is a dancer and a pianist and a newlywed couple and a lonely middle aged woman and a bickering couple and another couple who sleeps on the fire escape. It's exaggerated just so, partly comic, partly trenchant (who can not love the groom carrying the bride over the threshold?), and we see it more or less through Stewart's eyes, and appreciate his reactions up close. What a great set up for a movie, and for storytelling in general.
And so, night and day and beautiful twilight, we learn about the neighbors and events begin to sort out and suspicions about one neighbor's activities rise. And rise higher, causing disruption among those in Stewart's apartment (including his girlfriend, played by Grace Kelly). It goes from there, always a little lighthearted, but with such visual, quiet, deft handling you just sweep along happily, sometimes joyously. The echoes of camera angles, the moving in and out in space, the layering of close views and far as he looks through his camera's telephoto on and off, all make for a steady visual pace that gives a sense of control and confidence. We know we are in a deliberate movie, and that the artifice will surprise us and delight us both. And that we will come away unscathed, but enchanted.
There might be better made films, or more ingenious films, or movies that have deeper messages and funnier lines, or ones that move you one way or another, but there are few films this carefully flawless. You might say that about any number of Hitchcock films, but in fact those brief moments of montage or backprojection in those films are distracting to us now, coming in a movie of greater verisimilitude. In Rear Window, as in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter the next year, the artificial style and structure is part of the movie, and we accept it and require it to remain so.