Rear Window  

 

Year: 1954.

Starring: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr, Wendell Corey.

Production: Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount Pictures.

Screenplay: John Michael Hayes.

Photography: Robert Burks (Technicolor).

Music: Franz Waxman.

Duration: 108 min.

Color: color.

Cast:

Argument:
L.B.Jeffries, an injured photographer, starts watching his neighbourhood's life-time routine as a hobby while he rests. The strange behaviour of one of the neighbours, Lars Thorwald, makes him suspect that this neighbour could be planning his wife's murder.

However, he will have to prove that theory, in spite of what seems to be a normal neighbour's attitude (so normal that even his friend and policeman Tom does not believe him), so he begins to act as a real detective, with aid from his girlfriend Lisa and his nurse Stella, arriving to get really obsessed with that idea.

After a few days, his investigation will confirm the existence of Thorwald's wife's crime, thus putting Jeffries' life in serious danger. At the film's final stage, he will have to fight for his own life as Thorwald tries to kill him in order to get rid of the pursuit.

This film is held for one of the best films ever directed by Alfred Hitchcock (it was nominated for an Academy Award) and it's undoubtely the most famous and possibly the one where the "suspense feeling" gets to the maximal expression; the reduced scenario build (the whole camera's perspective is limited to the room and what is to be seen from its window) has its own specific weight on creating an atmosphere full of tension. Besides, it's one of the few movies where the commited crime does not get clear until the end of the film, something strange in Hitchcock's filmography.

Because of this, Hitchcock makes the viewer arrive to a personal opinion of what has really happened; this is caused due to the different opinions on the subject matter held by Jeffries, his girl-friend, the nurse and Tom.

Another evident classical stroke in this movie is Hitchcock's attempt to equalize movie's run- time with real life-time: in this case, the movie's action takes about 3 days until the crime is uncovered; this strengthens the film's argumental dynamism and therefore suspense.

By the way, the movie analyses an important aspect of human psychology: voyeurism. This psychological analysis is another important threed of Hitchcock's filmography, following the same line observed in 'Rope' (though much better realized) and 6 years before the excellent 'Psycho'.