Rear Window 1954

This thriller by the great movie maker Alfred Hitchcock is everybody’s urban nightmare,  being trapped alone in a tiny apartment during a summer heat wave with a broken leg and no ac or have I got an apartment for you. James Stewart in middle age mode plays the entire movie in a wheel chair nursing a broken leg received in a racing car accident. No he wasn’t driving he was photographing it and we can imagine how bad it was by his smashed camera and his leg in a cast. We see  personal details that Hitchcock introduces us to as clues to his career and life. This is done in a long opening pan of his apartment and beautifully tells us who Stewart is without any dialog just images of his belongs. A pile of Life Magazine’s with a photo of his on the cover, the original negative sits nearby in a frame, that busted camera, and other personal items that let us know that Stewart is a well established photo journalist who is caught napping by us in the hot 94 degree heat of a New York City summer.


The cramped cluttered apartment’s bamboo curtains are raised as if they were theatre curtains (this metaphor is also used in the opening credits) and we are about to see a play. The first act begins and the movie audience and Stewart can see into the various windows of his neighbors across the courtyard from his apartment, which is located in Greenwich Village. At first its just casual voyeurism he’s bored, but soon it develops into more serious peeping with Stewart using high powered binoculars to spy on a group of various typical and ordinary big city dwellers as they go about their everyday lives. A composer sweats over a composition as Hitchcock in his cameo winds a clock in the musician’s studio, a female dancer stretches and moves, a lonely women fantasizes about a gentleman caller, a husband and wife argue, young newlyweds move in and Stewart stares through his binoculars at these stereotypical New Yorkers sharing what he sees with us.  African Americans and Gays are nowhere to be seen even though it’s the village, but it is also America in the early 50’s so they are invisible. Popular songs of the day are heard, and played from radios and record players along with music waffling out from the composers studio amid the usual busy noises of a big city.

The main focus of the film and Stewart’s attention will be on the arguing husband and wife as he gets massages and wisecracks from his visiting nurse played with her usual comedic flair by the great Thelma Ritter We also meet his lady love in a remarkable dreamlike close up as she slowly comes in focus and plants a kiss on her sleeping prince. This may be one of the most sexually charged moments in American film, at least for the conservative 50’s besides being one of the most breathtaking. The lady is also breathtakingly beautiful. Grace Kelly who in her third film of the year and on her way to an Oscar plays a top notch high society fashion executive consultant who is herself a one woman fashion show decked out in beautiful Edith Head clothes and is a nice sidebar to the film.

Her relationship with Stewart is rocky, she wants to marry him, but he is hesitant and even distant with her, and their relationship mirrors a few of the relationships seen and heard floating over the courtyard and through his window and binoculars.  The other star of the film is the set, a remarkable fake exterior of what Hollywood thought a Greenwich Village dwelling would look like. It’s like a big slice of cake, with all its layers exposed for us to look into. We get a little glimpse of the street but everything important takes place in Stewart’s apartment and what he sees from his rear window. From inside his cramped apartment to the outside and back inside it’s a remarkable achievement of art direction, cinematography and of course direction. The crux of the film is a murder that Stewart believes was committed by one of his rear window neighbors and at first he has trouble convincing us, Kelly, Ritter and most of all his old war time buddy now a detective played by the dependable but dull Wendell Corey of his theory that a murder may have happened.  Needless to say they eventually come around to his theory and his convincing them is also part of the fun of this marvelous movie. There is plenty of cat and mouse especially during the last part of the movie along with the murder of a pet, a lit cigarette glowing in the interior of a dark apartment, a scream and a crash,  some welcomed humor mostly supplied by Thelma, and beautiful camera dissolves from a soaking fast summer rain storm to a sleeping Stewart in his chair who misses an important clue that is known to us.   The screenplay by John Michael Hayes is based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich that I recall from my reading of it years ago is sparse and not as rich and full as his screenplay and the film is. Pivotal characters are missing. The movie can also be seen as a horror film especially in last minutes of the final act, when the villain can also be seen as a monster, especially to a 7 year old which was how old I was when I first saw it a my neighborhood Loew’s.  So in the end the heat wave breaks, a killer is caught and life with some changes in the apartments across the courtyard goes on. Nominated for only four Oscars, director, screenplay, cinematography,  and sound recording it should have been nominated for many more. One of the ten best films of the year.