by Jake Hjort, Contributing Writer
Welcome back to another edition of 20th Century Flicks! This month, we’ll be traveling back a bit further in time to a film that will soon be celebrating its 70th birthday. The year was 1954: Schools in the U.S. were beginning to desegregate, The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers were first published in the United Kingdom, and Alfred Hitchcock released what would go down in history as one of his greatest works: Rear Window. Admittedly, Hitchcock’s filmography is a huge blind spot for me, as aside from a viewing of Dial M for Murder in a high school English class over a decade ago, I have yet to watch any of his films. Since I started writing at SiftPop, I’ve enjoyed having excuses to whittle down my list of shame and expand my film horizons, a mission that could certainly never be considered complete without checking off some of the greatest works of one of Hollywood’s greatest directors.
Rear Window tells the story of L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart), a photographer who finds himself confined to his New York City apartment after breaking his leg. With nothing better to do until he can walk again, Jeff becomes enraptured in the lives of his neighbors, watching them through their windows with his camera and trying to piece together the stories of their lives. Providing Jeff rare moments of companionship in his housebound state are his nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), and socialite girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly). One night, Jeff witnesses suspicious actions from his neighbor, Lars (Raymond Burr), which leads him to believe that Lars has murdered his wife. Together with Stella and Lisa, Jeff has to uncover the mystery of what has occurred, only having tiny glimpses through the windows to build his case of evidence and potentially uncover a heinous crime.
With a small cast and an even smaller setting — the camera hardly ever leaves Jeff’s apartment — it’s a real testament to Hitchcock’s filmmaking prowess how engaging Rear Window manages to be. Given that the film comes from the “master of suspense,” I was expecting to be on the edge of my seat throughout much of the runtime, but I found myself surprised at how subdued most of the film is. There’s a great, tense sequence at the climax when Lisa finds herself face-to-face with Lars while trying to search his apartment, but much of what occurs before that relies more on the excellent character work to keep your eyes glued to the screen.
Of course, much of the success of this character work rests on the great performances given by Stewart and Kelly. Stewart has long been one of my favorite actors of the classic Hollywood era, largely due to him gracing my television as George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas. There’s an interesting juxtaposition between these two characters: Jeff is cool, methodical, and pragmatic, a far cry from George Bailey’s affable, romantic nature. In Rear Window, this bright-eyed romanticism comes instead from Kelly’s Lisa, a character who lights up the screen with her charm. Looking back, it’s easy to see how Kelly was able to endear herself to so many and become an international superstar and princess.
What really makes Rear Window stand out is not these principal characters whose names and stories we know, but all those that we simply observe going through their lives, filling in the gaps with fantasy and presumptions. Cinema is inherently voyeuristic, allowing us to experience glimpses of strangers and their worlds through the lens of a camera, but this notion is brought to centerstage in Rear Window. Even today there’s a feeling of eating the forbidden fruit as we watch Jeff’s neighbors, as though we are privy to scenes that we have no right to see. I wonder if this may have been a prevailing viewpoint of film in general in the early days of Hollywood, back when movies were still a relatively new phenomenon and not deeply ingrained in the cultural zeitgeist.
Alongside the voyeurism, there are themes of paranoia in Rear Window that I do wish had been further developed. When Jeff first thinks he may have witnessed a murder and is explaining what he saw to his compatriots and the police, you have to question whether or not he is just going stir crazy and reading nefarious deeds into innocent actions. I’m hesitant to criticize a film I enjoyed so much for what it isn’t, but I do think that in another world, this could be the story of an obsessive, paranoid man damaging the lives of those around him with his delusional suspicions. In reality, everything that Jeff sees proves to be true, ending in him successfully incriminating Lars and becoming the hero of the story.
I have to say, my biggest issue with Rear Window is the expectations I had for it. When you’ve lived most of your life hearing that a film is one of the greatest ever made, it’s almost impossible for it to meet that standard once you finally get around to seeing it. Now, this isn’t to say that I disliked the film — if I had to put it on the traditional SiftPop ranking scale, I’d say that I’m on the high side of liked it — but it isn’t perfect, and I don’t think it’ll be cracking my top 100 films of all time. That said, Rear Window will live on in my estimation as a fascinating piece of film history and a testament to the ability of great art to persevere advancements in culture, technology, and storytelling.
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