Peeping Alfred

Alfred Hitchcock brought America's living rooms into the theater with his 1954 white-knuckler Rear Window. Appealing to the Peeping Tom in every Dick and Jane, Hitch put audiences squarely in the voyeur's seat (or, in this case, wheelchair).

America's cinematic Everyman, James Stewart, is L.B. Jefferies, a photographer with a broken leg who whiles away the lonely hours in his apartment by casually watching his neighbors' lives play out behind their picture windows across the courtyard. There's Miss Torso, a ballerina who performs a series of titillating aerobics during the day and plays hostess to several hormone-driven men at night. There's Miss Lonelyheart, a suicidal spinster who wishes she had Miss Torso's social life. There's the songwriter who bangs out his latest composition, bar by bar, in his studio apartment. There's the newlywed couple who pull down their window shade and (wink, wink) disappear for most of the movie.

Then there's Lars Thorwald. Played with burly menace by Raymond Burr, Thorwald is a traveling salesman who lives with his shrewish, invalid wife in their second-floor apartment. Like all the other lives Stewart spies on, our only clues to what's actually going on in the apartment is through pantomime, fragments of muffled conversation and the fictions Stewart spins with his nurse (Thelma Ritter) and girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly).

One night, an ear-splitting scream echoes throughout the courtyard. The next morning, Mrs. Thorwald's bed is empty. The trio in Jefferies' apartment start to let their imaginations run wild—and Hitchcock tightens our nerves until they're at the snapping point.

Is Thorwald a killer who chopped his wife into pieces? Or should Jefferies and company just mind their own business and leave the poor hen-pecked husband alone? We're never quite sure until the shattering conclusion.

The reason that Rear Window works so well, doing that tap-dance on our nerves, is because it presents a purely subjective point of view. Nearly everything is told completely from Jefferies' point of view. We see the neighbors through his binoculars and telephoto camera lens; we imagine what's taking place behind the plate-glass windows based on what he says to his nurse, his girlfriend, his detective friend (Wendell Corey). We watch his suspicions getting out of hand and we think, "Well, maybe he's leaping to conclusions, maybe he's going buggy sitting there all cooped up in that room, maybe he's a crackpot." Then, just as quickly, we think, "Nah, it's Jimmy Stewart for criminey's sake!"

Notice I said that "nearly everything" was told from the subjective point of view. Hitchcock breaks the rules a couple of times with shots that could never have come from Jefferies' apartment and another time we're shown an important bit of information (Thorwald leaving his apartment with a woman) while Jefferies dozes. Those "cheats" have always bothered me and I wondered why Hitchcock allowed them in an otherwise perfect finished product.

But, as you can tell, I've seen Rear Window nearly a dozen times. At this point, I'm just nit-picking a masterpiece.

Rear Window is a masterpiece of technological filmmaking. There's almost no musical score to speak of. Most of the soundtrack is comprised of street sounds, muffled dialogue from across the way and the ever-present piano playing of the top-floor composer. If we close our eyes, it sounds like Hitchcock is slowly turning a radio dial.

One moment, however, is stunningly silent: the time we first see Grace Kelly. With her cool, blonde good looks, what man wouldn't be stunned into silence? She enters Jefferies' apartment at night when he's drowsing in his wheelchair and moves in for a kiss, her gorgeous face filling the screen as she plants her lips on us—er, I mean, Stewart. The movie is dead silent, as if all the breath had been sucked out of the theater. Only the three-minute kiss between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Notorious is more sensual in all of Hitchcock's decidedly sexual repertoire.

Hitchcock was not only the Master of Suspense, he was also the Master of Style. His cinematic tricks were on full display here in Rear Window. Watch, for instance, that incredibly compact first shot: in one fluid take, the camera pans across several of the neighbors' window tableaus, introducing us in 30-second snippets to the drama we're about to witness; then it pulls back and suddenly we're confronted with beads of sweat rolling down a forehead—it's Stewart asleep in his wheelchair on a hot summer day. The camera continues to pan down his body and we see a cast with the words "Here lie the broken bones of L.B. Jefferies." Next, the lens moves to some pictures on his wall—one of them is of a race car flipped up on end and hurtling toward the photographer. Then, finally, Hitchcock's punch line: we see a smashed camera. In one take, we've learned everything about Stewart's character without one word of dialogue being spoken. When characters later fill us in on the details of the racetrack accident, it's all superfluous.

Rear Window was another in a series of clever experiments Hitchcock kept testing during his career. In his famous interviews with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock explained his attraction to the project: “It was a possibility of doing a purely cinematic film. You have an immobilized man looking out. That’s one part of the film. The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts. This is actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea.”

This wasn’t the first time Hitchcock confined himself to a narrow range of options. In Lifeboat, the entire action takes place on a raft; in Rope (also starring Stewart), the entire movie is shot in one continuous take. In my view, Rear Window is better than those other films because the story is so good, we forget the trickery involved and get caught up in what is one damn suspenseful flick.

At one point near the climax, I always find myself literally squirming in my seat with agony as Lisa enters the suspected killer's apartment and Jefferies watches helplessly through his telephoto lens as Thorwald returns. Jefferies bites his knuckle and gasps as Thorwald discovers Lisa and starts strangling her. It's like a bad dream we can't wake up from but we're forced to watch. Sir Peeping Alfred demands our voyeuristic attention in every frame of the movie.

If ever there was a movie to watch from between my fingers, this is it.