It didn't work for me, the suspense was missing.

Rating: 5/10 (26 July 2015)

I am aware that many people like this film a lot, and after many years it has indeed become a classic, and that's why I saw it for the first time yesterday. And I found it updated which is not very strange since we are talking about a film made in the early fifties. There is not much suspense in the plot mostly because as the story goes by, it is very obvious who the murderer is. The definition of suspense is: that the spectator should be guessing who the guilty person is, or even better: guessing who the bad guy is. In this film, we do know who the bad guy is, but we don't know if he really did it or not. Real suspense would have been that the guy that everyone thought that did it, in fact didn't, and that the one that looks innocent had done it. Now that would've been a twist! There are a couple of other things that killed the suspense in me. Why a man that is a photographer and tries to convince a policeman that his neighbour killed his wife and has no evidence and is looking through the window with a telephoto camera, doesn't take pictures of the scene of the crime and use them as evidence. And how come that a man that is going to murder his wife and cut her in small pieces doesn't draw down the window blinds so no one can see what he is doing and testify against him!?. But I have to admit, typically Hitchcock, delivers a proffesional job because he makes you see things that only a great director like him can. He will make you believe that Jeff and Lisa are absolutely right and everyone else is wrong just by watching this couple's attitude, created through their acting. And there is the strength of these actors; they are extremely reassuring in their personalities that as such, it impregnates the whole film. Just by the way they pose and sit and look you can almost smell that whatever they do is right. On the contrary, Thorwald hasn't a chance because from the very first scene he is doomed; he is the bad guy almost before the film has started. And I intuitively guessed it and killed all the suspense. I liked "Vertigo" even if some scenes are a little bit slow and long and I liked "Psycho", that's a masterpiece. But "Rear Window" it's too obvious.