More than a nail-biter, a work of art...

Rating: 10/10 (16 June 1999)

There are two things about this film that make it my favorite of all the Hitchcock films I've seen: #1, Grace Kelly's performance and #2, the level of art achieved by the story.
Grace Kelly was certainly a great actress and a lovely lady, but for some reason this is the film I think of whenever I think of her. I never wanted to be a princess, but as a kid I used to imagine reprising her role in this movie.
More intellectually, the story is so fabulous because it varies the pace, builds and plays with the suspense, rather than trying to keep us on the edge of our seats every second. Life plays in varied tempos. Also, it is so realistic in depicting the guy in his room with a broken leg (been there, though thankfully by my day they'd invented the VCR). Yet, within this realistic and believable situation, the ordinary man's rather understandable voyeurism works so well because it becomes a metaphor for our own inescapable solipsism. We're all prisoners of our own little room (self), looking out on the world and trying to understand it and the other people in it. We get glimpses of their lives through their windows, but that is all we can get.