Rear Window

The hero of Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" is

trapped in a wheelchair, and we're trapped, too--trapped inside his point of

view, inside his lack of freedom and his limited options. When he passes his

long days and nights by shamelessly maintaining a secret watch on his

neighbors, we share his obsession. It's wrong, we know, to spy on others, but

after all, aren't we always voyeurs when we go to the movies? Here's a film

about a man who does on the screen what we do in the audience--look through a

lens at the private lives of strangers.

The man is a famous photographer named L.B.

Jeffries--"Jeff" to his fiancée. He's played by James Stewart as a

man of action who has been laid up with a broken leg and a heavy cast that runs

all the way up to his hip. He never leaves his apartment and has only two

regular visitors. One is his visiting nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), who

predicts trouble ("the New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six

months in the workhouse"). The other is his fiancée, Lisa Fremont (Grace

Kelly), an elegant model and dress designer, who despairs of ever getting him

to commit himself. He would rather look at the lives of others than live inside

his own skin, and Stella lectures him, "What people ought to do is get

outside their own house and look in for a change."

Jeff's

apartment window shares a courtyard with many other windows (all built on a

single set by Hitchcock), and as the days pass he becomes familiar with some of

the other tenants. There is Miss Lonelyhearts, who throws dinner parties for

imaginary gentleman callers; and Miss Torso, who throws drinks parties for

several guys at a time; and a couple who lower their beloved little dog in a

basket to the garden, and a composer who fears his career is going nowhere. And

there is Thorvald (Raymond Burr), a man with a wife who spends all her days in

bed and makes life miserable for him. One day the wife is no longer to be seen,

and by piecing together several clues (a saw, a suitcase, a newly dug spot in

Thorvald's courtyard garden), Jeff begins to suspect that a murder has taken

place.

The

way he determines this illustrates the method of the movie. Rarely has any film

so boldly presented its methods in plain view. Jeff sits in his wheelchair,

holding a camera with a telephoto lens, and looks first here and then there,

like a movie camera would. What he sees, we see. What conclusions he draws, we

draw--all without words, because the pictures add up to a montage of suspicion.

In

the earliest days of cinema, the Russian director Kuleshov performed a famous

experiment in which he juxtaposed identical shots of a man's face with other

shots. When the man was matched with food, audiences said the man looked

hungry, and so on. The shots were neutral. The montage gave them meaning.

"Rear Window" (1954) is like a feature-length demonstration of the

same principle, in which the shots assembled in Jeff's mind add up to murder.

I

sometimes fancy that various archetypal situations circled tirelessly in

Hitchcock's mind, like whales in a tank at the zoo. One of them was fascination

of voyeurism--of watching people who do not know they are being watched.

Another, famously, was the notion of an innocent man wrongly accused. And many

of his films illustrate male impotence or indifference in the face of cool

blond beauty. Much is said of Hitchcock's blonds (Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint,

Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren), but observe that they are not erotic playmates so

much as puzzles or threats. Lisa, the Kelly character, has a hopeless love for

Jeff, who keeps her at arm's length with descriptions of his lifestyle; a

fashion model wouldn't hold up in the desert or jungle, he tells her.

But

perhaps his real reason for keeping her away is fear of impotence, symbolized

by the leg cast, and we are reminded of the strikingly similar relationship

between Scotty, the Stewart character in "Vertigo," and the fashion

illustrator played by Barbara Bel Geddes. She, too, loves him. He keeps his

distance. She sympathizes with his vertigo, as Kelly nurses the broken leg.

Both observe his voyeuristic obsessions. In "Vertigo," Scotty falls

in love with a woman he has spied upon but never spoken to. In "Rear

Window," he is in love with the occupation of photography, and becomes

completely absorbed in reconstructing the images he has seen through his lens.

He wants what he can spy at a distance, not what he can hold in his arms.

Stewart

is an interesting choice to play these characters. In the 1930s and 1940s he

played in light comedy, romances, crime stories and Westerns, almost always as

a character we liked. After the war, he revealed a dark side in the fantasy

scenes of Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," and Hitchcock exploited

that side, distant and cold, in "Rope," "The Man Who Knew Too

Much," "Vertigo" and "Rear Window." To understand the

curious impact of these roles, consider Tom Hanks, whose everyman appeal is

often compared to Jimmy Stewart's. What would it feel like to see him in a

bizarre and twisted light?

In

"Rear Window," Jeff is not a moralist, a policeman or a do-gooder,

but a man who likes to look. There are crucial moments in the film where he is

clearly required to act, and he delays, not because he doesn't care what

happens, but because he forgets he can be an active player; he is absorbed in a

passive role. Significantly, at the end, when he is in danger in his own

apartment, his weapon is his camera's flashgun; he hopes to blind or dazzle his

enemy, and as the man's eyesight gradually returns, it is through a blood-red

dissolve that suggests passion expressed through the eyes.

Kelly

is cool and elegant here, and has some scenes where we feel her real hurt. She

likes to wear beautiful dresses, make great entrances, spoil Jeff with

champagne and catered dinners. He doesn't notice or doesn't like her attention,

because it presumes a relationship he wants to elude. There is one shot, partly

a point-of-view closeup, in which she leans over him to kiss him, and the

camera succumbs to her sexuality even if Jeff doesn't; it's as if she's begging

the audience to end its obsession with what Jeff is watching, and consider

instead what he

should

be drinking in with his eyes--her

beauty.

The

remote-control suspense scenes in "Rear Window" are Hitchcock at his

most diabolical, creating dangerous situations and then letting Lisa and Stella

linger in them through Jeff's carelessness or inaction. He stays in his

wheelchair. They venture out into danger--Kelly even entering the apartment of

the suspected wife killer. He watches. We see danger approaching. We, and he,

cannot move, cannot sound the alarm.

This

level of danger and suspense is so far elevated above the cheap thrills of the

modern slasher films that "Rear Window," intended as entertainment in

1954, is now revealed as art. Hitchcock long ago explained the difference

between surprise and suspense. A bomb under a table goes off, and that's

surprise. We know the bomb is under the table but not when it will go off, and

that's suspense. Modern slasher films depend on danger that leaps unexpectedly

out of the shadows. Surprise. And surprise that quickly dissipates, giving us a

momentary rush but not satisfaction. "Rear Window" lovingly invests

in suspense all through the film, banking it in our memory, so that when the

final payoff arrives, the whole film has been the thriller equivalent of

foreplay.