#14 in the Reverse Hitchcock project.
This one is often classed as one of Hitch’s greatest films, being the first collaboration of four with John Michael Hayes as writer, and boasting a jaunty theme tune over the credits by Franz Waxman.
It opens on a set of interlinked apartments, where, in one window, we find a feverish James Stewart, and in another, a man listening to that Charles Atlas ‘men, are you over forty? do you have that listness feeling?’ ad. It’s an interlinked group of lives where voyeurs and voyeured co-exist.
Jeffries (Stewart) has a broken leg and so is stuck in the space with his memorabilia and his boredom. Small wonder that soon, very soon, he was start to see something in the window across, when he’s emerged from his ‘plaster cocoon’ and his ability to watch the pretty girl across the way doing her exercises. What a mucky old man our Jimmy is.
This film catches the interest within the first five minutes, which is quite a feat. Within the first ten, we meet so many different people with their own little pockets of existence, and eventually, we meet the glorious Thelma Ritter, and any film which has here as a character player has my interest (‘we’ve become a nation of peeping toms’). Her squeaky voice and her plain yet interesting face made her a recognisable figure in numerous showy roles.
It’s hot and sticky in this suite of apartments, and everyone has their windows open so snatches of music and conversation can be heard by our bored invalid, who seems disappointed when a newlywed couple pull down the shades!
Fifteen minutes in, and the luminous Grace Kelly as Lisa leans in to kiss Jimmy Stewart in slow-mo, and we know he’s not quite as lonely as we thought. Kelly looks fantastic in costumes by Edith Head, a stunning actress playing a stunning model. No surprise she quickly became a princess in real life.
‘Rear Window’ cleverly builds the audience interest and tension by having not that much happen to start with, but Jeffries’ eyes become our eyes and we start to see what he sees and react as he reacts – that’s clever film-making. The lonely lady who makes a place for two while her wireless crooner keeps her company is particularly poignant – we smile with her, we raise our glass, we feel her despondency at her empty table.
We keep being drawn back to Raymond Burr, though, just over the way, and the sense that not all is well in his apartment. After a scream, a lot of night departures, and other suspicious circumstances, our hero Jeffries starts to believe he has witnessed something close to murder. But will anyone believe him?
The sinister scene where Thorwald sits in the dark, quiet, when all hell breaks loose in the apartment block, tells us he might be a bad egg after all, far worse than Jeffries, who spies on his neighbours with cameras and binoculars, neighbours who are just trying to get on with their lives.
Just like cameras had a focal point in ‘Peeping Tom;, here they start to become central to the story of ‘Rear Window’. But the final sequences, where Jeffries nearly comes a cropper, and then the picture of domesticity with him and Lisa at the end, are classic Hitch.
I don’t think this is his best film, but it is clever, and contains a couple of strong performances from his close collaborators Stewart and Kelly, both of which probably did their best work for this director – he certainly got a couple of career best turns out of Stewart with this and with ‘Rope’.