Rear Window (1954)

“The most densely allegorical of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces (1954), moving from psychology to morality to formal concerns and finally to the theological. It is also Hitchcock’s most innovative film in terms of narrative technique, discarding a linear story line in favor of thematically related incidents, linked only by the powerful sense of real time created by the lighting effects and the revolutionary ambient sound track.” — Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“As much as I admire all of these, especially Vertigo, I can’t imagine that any one of them will top the feelings of exhilaration that are prompted by Rear Window, this most bittersweet of Hitchcockian suspense-romances. Make no mistake about it: Rear Window is as much of a romance as it is a brilliant exercise in suspense.” — Vincent Canby, The New York Times

SYNOPSIS

Leave it to Alfred Hitchcock, that supreme architect of Classical Hollywood cinema, long reduced merely to the label “Master of Suspense,” to craft one of cinema’s shrewdest meditations on the act of looking in the guise of a thriller. Confined to his apartment with a broken leg, photographer L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) passes the time peering into the lives of his neighbors across a sweltering Greenwich Village courtyard, gradually suspecting he may have witnessed a murder. Positioning Jeffries not unlike the spectator in a movie theater, Hitchcock transforms voyeurism, desire, and the act of observation itself into the very machinery of suspense, turning a single apartment complex into one of the most brilliantly controlled spaces in Hollywood cinema. Co-starring a luminous Grace Kelly as Jeffries’ sophisticated fiancée, eager to domesticate his restless bachelorhood, and the incomparable Thelma Ritter, Hitchcock’s masterful romantic thriller charts a furtive descent into voyeuristic complicity, as even those closest to Jeffries become drawn into the seductive and perilous logic of observation itself.