Restorers' Error

What the restorers of Rear Window don't know is that there exist two dream sequences in the first part of the movie.

The first takes place after Grace Kelly leaves, and James Stewart has heard the scream from across the courtyard. Thelma Ritter, Grace Kelly, and the courtyard are shown while dialogue from Thelma Ritter's argument with Stewart about Lisa, and Lisa's argument with Stewart, are heard with an echo. The composer's new song is heard.

The second takes place after Stewart has waked up and noticed the salesman taking a suitcase out during the rain, coming back, and taking the suitcase out again. The composer's song is heard over the image which shows the salesman arguing with his wife, the artist neighbor telling the salesman he is giving the plants too much water, Thelma Ritter saying "I've got a nose for trouble, I can smell it ten miles away." Then Ritter says, "I can smell trouble right in this apartment. First you break your leg, then you start looking out the window, seeing things you shouldn't see," while we see the wife catching the salesman in the other room talking to his girlfriend on the phone, then Ritter saying "We've become a race of Peeping Toms, what we ought to do is get outside ourselves and look in once in a while. The New York sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse. There are no windows in the workhouse. You know, in the old days they used to put people's eyes out with a red-hot poker. Any of those worth a red-hot poker?" as we see the salesman carrying the suitcase out into the rain.

When Stewart wakes up the apartment complex is dark, the shades are drawn. He sees Miss Torso come home from her evening out. Then he sits up as he sees the salesman coming back for a second time with the suitcase.

Each sequence is introduced by a rippling of the image of Stewart's sleeping face, and his face is superimposed over the dream images.

These dream sequences articulate the major themes of the movie: the dubious morality of voyeurism, Stewart's sexual ambivalence about Grace Kelly and his interest in other women, the salesman's conflict with his wife, Thelma Ritter's attempts to persuade Stewart to come back to a normal way of living. The salesman's problems with his wife are an analog to Stewart's problems with Grace Kelly. The core of voyeurism is sexuality, and this is shown over and over again in the movie. The motive for the salesman's murder of his wife is another woman. Miss Lonelyhearts' attempted suicide is because of her failed relationships with men. Miss Torso is fighting off suitors and trying to save herself for her husband, who, in a comic moment at the end of the movie, returns from military service more interested in food than in his sensual wife. The newlyweds keep their shades drawn because they are making love.

The restorers should have researched the film more carefully. Neither restored transfer includes these dream sequences as "deleted scenes."

Spying through a glass darkly (his camera lens), L.B. Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart) believes a neighbor (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife. His evidence is circumstanial at best and the wheelchair bound photographer has to convince his girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly)of the crime. In the process he puts his friends in harm's way. Hitch laces his film with more than a touch of humor and irony pulling this thriller together as it's L.B.'s peeping that reveals the ugly underneath--revealing something unsavory about himself as well without him truly realizing it.

One of Hitch's hidden classics for years was finally revealed again to the public in the early 80's. This remaster looks extremely good (and is the same as the boxed set remaster) but keep in mind the age of the film, when it was shot, etc. as it IS grainy (there seems to be a generation tht is convinced that grain is bad)but still looks marvelous. THis anamorphic transfer looks crisper with better fine detail than the previous single disc release.

The extras that came with the boxed set as well as those from the previous single DVD release have been ported over to this release as well. We get one delicious extra--a theme appropriate episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" with the Hitchcock directed episode ""Mr. Blanchard's Secret".

Hitchcock manages to do more with less than just about any director out there. Using a single soundstage, a small cast and the witty script by John Michael Hayes, Hitchcock crafts one of his classic films. "Rear Window" has aged yes but it looks, sounds and plays remarkably well fifty four years after it's original theatrical release. Highly recommended.

While Psycho is my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie, Rear Window is a close second, and it is to my mind the classiest suspense movie he made. Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly provide that classiness. Cool and brazen Grace, subtlely provoking Jimmy at every turn, knowing he is stuck helpless with a broken leg in a cast, while she cavorts about getting too close to the murderer, and enjoying his nervousness. The murderer is played by Ramond Burr in a strange role for him--but he is very scary. In a stroke of genius, Hitchcock provides us a cutaway view of the appartments across the way and the dramas going on inside of them. We start getting invested in the stories of the inhabitants. Thelma Ritter adds something to the movie that it could not do without. As Stewart's private duty nurse, her no-nonsence philosophies of life are very necessary for thorough scene development. I never get tired of watching this movie. Barbara Bel Geddes is also very good as Jimmy's secretary.

Some films show their age, and others do not. Despite its reputation as a classic of great filmmaking, Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film Rear Window, unfortunately, shows its age far too much. No, it's certainly not a bad film, by any standard, and is a pretty good one, but it's not one of Hitchcock's best, much less a great film, nor deserving of any place in the Top 100 Films lists of the last few years. Technically, it deserves many plaudits, but what really fails is the screenplay, written originally by John Michael Hayes for a radio play, and adapted from a short story by Cornell Woolrich. Yes, one can suspend disbelief from night till day comes, but the whole idea that a man would murder his wife and cut up her body all in front of an open window is sheerly implausible, even back in the 1950s New York milieu the film takes place in. Even one of the film's characters, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) comments on that fact, but it's not with irony, which only highlights the film's greatest failing- its implausibility.
Now, there are genres where the suspension of disbelief is absolutely essential. For example, one of my favorite films from childhood, the original Planet Of The Apes (1968) requires a great suspension of disbelief, far more so than Rear Window does. After all, the Charlton Heston character, Colonel Taylor, a veteran trained astronaut and scientist, goes throughout the whole film not recognizing the sun and moon, the constellations, the unlikely evolutionary odds that humans and apes could evolve anywhere but Earth, and that the apes speak English, no less! It's not until he sees the wreck of the Statue Of Liberty that he realizes he's back on our world. I was four or five when I first saw the film, and knew it was Earth a minute or two after the astronauts arrived on the Planet Of The Apes. Perhaps too closely studying books on geology and science destroys a youthful ability to suspend disbelief, but the rest of the film was so brilliantly satirical that the implausibilities were minor solecisms. In short, there is no story unless we accept these liberties with common sense, including the fact that the astronauts could be frozen in suspended animation for two eons. It's an all or none proposition- accept, or walk out of the theater. Genres that depend on the implausible- like sci fi and horror, demand such of their audience, and once given it's foolish to quibble over things like time travel, faster than light speed, aliens, modern dinosaurs, ghosts, atomic age mutants, or the like....The plot is well known.... While not a great film overall, Rear Window is a technically great film. The camera work by cinematographer Robert Burks is first rate, and the film goes over many standard Hitchcock themes such as voyeurism- especially apt in this cyberworld of 24/7 voyeurism, marriage as a horror, and challenging technical restrictions, as in Lifeboat and Rope. There are many small moments in the film that work for effect- such as pure mise-en-scene shots of Jeff or the neighbors doing minor things unrelated to the main tale. And, there is some comedy, such as after Jeff is tossed out the window, and Thorwald is arrested, Stella comments to the cops, `I don't want any part of it', when asked about assisting in the search for Anna Thorwald's body. Still, none of the many pluses of the film are enough to lift the film up from a good, solid period piece, for Rear Window's reputation is based largely upon its claim to being a slice of `realism'. It's not. It's far closer to melodrama with its reliance on coincidences and implausibilities- not to mention the very sexism of the premise that a woman is so predictable that even her murder can be deduced by small deviances from that predictability, to propel the main action along. And melodrama, while it can often be great fun, is almost never great art. Rear Window is vastly overrated, and no exception that proves the rule. It is the rule, and that's a fact no amount of suspended disbelief can alter.

This film has become a cult film with time. Everything seems to be at that level though the situation and plot are rather light. What is important here is that Hitchcock transforms this back yard and garden surrounded by buildings all around and a highly voyeuristic microcosm into a complete vision of human society with all its dramas, and its pleasures and joys. To transform such a small microcosm entirely closed onto itself into a vision of the whole society we hardly get a couple of glimpses of through an alley opening onto the main street is marvelous and amazing. The second phenomenal fact is that the main actor is a wheelchair-ridden man with a severely broken leg in a cast. How can the whole world completely turn and whirl around that sole man? It is only possible because it is absolutely seen through the only eyes of this man or the eyes of the people standing next to him. There is only one instance when the point of vision is not his own eyes but a point outside in the yard-garden: at the end when he is being dropped from his window and then we get for a very short period of time the vision from the cops' eyes. This gives to that film such a personal dimension that it is nearly sickening: we have the impression of invading the privacy of that man. In fact what I have just said is false because he alternates what the man can see and close-up shots on him to show his personal reactions to what he has just seen. This constant alternating of voyeuristic sequences from the eyes of one man and close-up shots on his body language and language forces us into his own skin, body, bones. We are no longer voyeurs but ghosts in him seeing through his eyes. We are the direct witnesses of what he sees because we see it with him, through his own eyes and we start feeling the same emotions as he does. Of course everything is seen through the camera, but Hitchcock even uses some tools to emphasize the voyeuristic dimension and force us into it: a camera with a zooming lens that is so big that the camera becomes minuscule, or binoculars that are of course too big for the distance across the back yard and later the flash bulbs to force us not to see through the eyes of the murderer but to be seen through the eyes of the murderer. The last point I would like to insist on is that Hitchcock shows a murder but he is not interested in the murder per se but in the reactions of the witnesses, those who see everything and how they are blind to what they see. Then he builds up the slow recognition in their eyes, language and behavior, and then they become obsessive about it, to the point of becoming if not courageous at least unconscious of the risks they are taking or running. That too is remarkable and that nearly makes us get out of the simplistic voyeurism I have spoken of all along and climb into some kind of distantiation from the penned up impression of before, a distantiation that leads us to the idea that courage in a human society is often the result of a conviction that makes us blind to the danger or risk we are facing. Courage is the result of a lack of consciousness more than intensified consciousness. This is the human dimension Hitchcock always brought to his films. And that is kind of lost in our modern action films that do not have one single second now and then to just rest and digest what has happened before.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines