A review requested by Benjamin, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.

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Rear Window is a film about the prurient voyeurism of watching movies. You know this. I know this. Alfred Hitchcock, the film's director, knew this. John Michael Hayes, the screenwriter, knew this, although having never read the short story the film was adapted from, I do not know if the story's writer Cornell Woolrich, knew this, but I have to imagine he did. Art directors Hal Pereira and Joseph MacMillian Johnson did. All those French theorists who made a cottage industry out of "solving" Hitchcock films sure as hell did. And in a way that could have been barely imagined in 1954, when the film premiered, it's even more specifically about the prurient voyeurism of watching television: of sitting in your living room, bored out of your goddamned mind, blandly glancing from one square-shaped window on human beings framed in medium shots to the next, hoping that one of them will contain at least some amount of sex or violence, insofar as the censors will allow you to actually see anything. And it's about how that habit of treating humanity as nothing but spectacle, fodder to keep yourself distracted from your own life, can end up turning into something very grisly and unpleasant.

Since we all know that, and have since 1954 (though, in fairness, the film spent a very substantial portion of its first three decades of life locked in a vault with four other Hitchcock movies - Rope, The Trouble with Harry, the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo - at which point we probably only knew it through reputation), I would like to take it as read. This is a film about how watching movies and TV is voyeurism, and we're all a little bit naughty for doing it, and Hitch is a little bit naughty for making films that let us do it. Okay, done.

I ask that we do this not because I think that it's not an important aspect of what the film is doing, or that it's not a very interesting and compelling aspect of what the film is up to, but because I think it has to some extent become so much the thing we know about Rear Window that we risk losing sight of the other main thing that the film is about - the "actual" thing the movie is about, I would almost say, if I wanted to be deliberately cheeky. And I will not be making a radical, groundbreaking contribution to film criticism when I say that Rear Window, like the vast majority of films in Hitchcock's career, is primarily about the convoluted path, leading through elaborate genre machinery, by which a romantic couple is formed and/or recommits to itself. This is the meat of the thing, far more than the question of whether irritably wheelchair-bound L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart is correct in his suspicion that Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), the man who lives in an apartment across the courtyard from Jeff's, murdered his wife and hacked her into small pieces in order to move the body in several trips with a suitcase during the course of a long stormy night one miserably hot summer. Long before that plotline enters the movie, we've already been introduced to the central question of the movie: why is Jeff being such a tetchy prick to Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), his doting girlfriend who is just dementedly invested in getting Jeff to propose, and who is written as being so all-around perfect she's almost a parody of a desirable woman? Jeff himself makes an effort, very early in the film, to suggest that it's because she's perfect, and she'll grow tired of his imperfect ass in hardly any time at all, but the film brings this up almost solely to smack it down as obvious bullshit in the form of Stella (Thelma Ritter), a brusque physical therapist whose main function in the script is to clomp in and bluntly declare "hey, here are some overriding themes and objective truths" as the film's anointed Voice of Wisdom. And in a good example of how even in one of the most tightly-controlled films Hitchcock ever made, there's still a lot of collaboration involved, part of the reason she gets to be so anointed is through the fact of casting Ritter, one of the defining character actors of the 1950s, mostly playing something like the tart-tongued embodiment of Working Class New York Street Smarts.

Anyway Stella generally serves to tell us exactly what we are meant to be thinking, so when she tells us that Jeff is being a big dummy, we believe her. The bulk of Rear Window is, then, a dive into Jeff's terror of life in comfortable domestic partnership, in which even the ugly murder is ultimately just one of several small glimpses of Romantic Life Today, a parody of a marriage gone so rotten that the only solution is to end it. Jeff's voyeurism doesn't start out trying to see which of his neighbors might be a murderer, after all; it starts by him spying on everyday lives, almost of all of which are defined in terms of romantic relationships or sex: a newlywed couple entering their first apartment together as a tinny, kitschy cover of "That's Amore" plays from some unseen offscreen space; an older couple sleeping on their fire escape; a sexy young single woman who receives lots of gentleman callers and a middle-aged single woman steadily trying to remain somewhat fashionable as she receives none; a man bashing his way through writing a slick, tepidly romantic pop song. The voyeurism is, ultimately, Jeff's exercise in thinking about several different ways his life could spill out, the options if he does commit to Lisa and the options if he doesn't. Even the thriller narrative is ultimately about reassuring him that everything will be okay if does: the whole matter of investigating the murder is largely about proving A) that Lisa is more excited to do reckless, foolhardy things that he's willing to give her credit for, so she might fit into his own reckless, foolhardy life more comfortably than he supposes, and B) there's much more intrigue and danger and excitement in New York than he seems to have been aware of, in his constant jetting around the world looking for trouble (he's a photojournalist with a particular talent for war zones), and he could stay put right here, fitting into her Manhattan-oriented existence far more readily than he's been willing to admit. And in the wonderfully wordless way of so many of Hitchcock's finest moments, the film's very last framing - one of the best final shots in the director's career - suggests that Lisa has gotten so bored of Jeff dithering that she's finally just resolved to make his decisions for him, or at least to forcibly remind us that while he's been busily having his character arc, she's been having one of her own. In essence, the film is a romantic comedy, rather classically-structured at that, notwithstanding all of the thriller bits.

Whatever themes we want to privilege - "we gawk at violence", "we gawk at other people's private lives", "men are dopes who fear commitment" - Rear Window digs into those themes with some of the most immaculate filmmaking in Hitchcock's career, which by default makes it some of the most immaculate filmmaking in the history of the medium. In truth, I do not L-O-V-E Rear Window as much as some of Hitch's other major AAA-level masterpieces (it's not even in my top 5 Hitchcock films), not least because it feels so exact: there's none of the wry wiggliness of North by Northwest or the other "bantering while we're on the run" movies, the feeling of having been served a big fluffy slice of cake with arsenic frosting. All of the great Hitchcock films are ruthless precise, but I find that Rear Window is uniquely prone to demanding that I notice its precision and genuflect in awe. That being said, it is a masterpiece, I cannot fathom thinking otherwise. For one thing, it's probably the most technically audacious film the director ever made, starting with that absolute legend of a set: the largest ever built at Paramount up to that point, and Paramount, lest we forget, was Cecil B. DeMille's home turf. It depicts a Greenwich Village apartment block down to every detail, making sure that the sightlines are perfect for using all of the windows on the far and left sides to stage complex blocking of fully-realised human lives. And then, having constructed such a once-in-a-career monstrosity, the filmmakers don't even bother showing it off, because that would spoil the purity of the exercise, which is to almost exclusively shoot from within the single room of Jeff's apartment set. The film only breaks this twice, once when Jeff himself... spoiler alert for a movie that I've been writing about on the assumption that you have already seen it and know it pretty well, but when Jeff tumbles out of his window, and we get "ground level" shots for the first and only time. The other time we leave is during the scene when the whole courtyard is horrified by the discovery of the dead dog, and a few shots are pointing up at balconies from within the courtyard. And I think we can forgive this one break in the film's otherwise perfect aesthetic on the grounds that this is the one point in the film when all of those several human lives are briefly focused on exactly the same thing, and it's kind of magnificent that even Hitchcock was enough of a sentimentalist to understand the universal human condition, that we get a sick thrill at the thought of a husband murdering his wife, but we are fucking outraged at the thought of him murdering a dog.

But twice in a 112-minute film, that's basically nothing at all. The vast majority of Rear Window is shot through the windows in Jeff's apartment, for if this film is to be about spectatorship and looking at things, it had better be ruthless in honoring perspective. In fact, the film goes far beyond locking itself into Jeff's visual perspective: famously, the film's entire soundtrack is diegetic, with street noises and inarticulate yammering from people just too far away to hear them clearly, and music constantly filtering in, bouncing off of every side of the brick box of the courtyard to create ugly echoes that leave it feeling thin and hollow. For all the other things the film picks up as its themes, at the level of story - and we should always be first concerned with what a film is doing at the level of story, the rest is all ultimately just flavoring - this is basically about being stuck in one awful, boring place, and trying to grab whatever stimulation you can from it. We must feel the presence of Jeff's apartment in the most emphatic way, and the unrelenting sonic realism is a major way the film can achieve that presence, without having to force the actors or cinematographer Robert Burks (who does fantastic things with color saturation: the film is mostly in browns, greys, and creams, the colors of the city, so when there are individual bursts of color - flowers or Grace Kelly's gowns, mostly - he goes overboard in making sure they pop) to go in for realism themselves. It's a great mixture of profound movie artifice - you can always sort of feel that this is a great big huge set, not a real building - and groundedness.

I was speaking of precise technical control, though. Rear Window has been choreographed down to the smallest degree: all of the actors playing characters on the far side of the courtyard were wearing earpieces, so that they could be directed from across the way, with Hitchcock able to align the movements within those dozen or so windows with perhaps the closest we've ever gotten to a God's-eye-view position for the director. This results in a great many moments where the buzzy human activity feels both perfect and organic; it results in a few key scenes that control what we can and cannot with an exacting perfection unmatched by basically anything else. The late scenes that send Kelly across the courtyard are some of the most absurdly perfect suspense sequences in a career devoted to absurdly perfect suspense sequences: in particular a scene where we see the Thorwald apartment through two windows, with Kelly and Burr vanishing off the edges of the window frames, is one of the defining scenes in all of Hitchcock, limiting our perspective and cutting out any useful audio information, but still allowing us to infer the entire nervy dance between a dangerous man and a wily woman even as we only see brief reactions and fragments of movement. It's basically unmatched in its use of extreme wide shots that still force our attention in certain ways until the airtight control of perspective in Jacques Tati's PlayTime, 13 years later. Rear Window isn't giving us that much freedom to move our eyes around the frame: Hitchcock is still making a big Hollywood studio movie for the widest possible audience (and he found that audience; this was one of the biggest hits of 1954), and he's making sure that we never miss any important information. When the film needs to show us just window, Jeff can always bust out one of his many telephoto lenses to motivate a closer shot. And, of course, fully half of the shots in the film are pointing back into the room, watching Stewart, Kelly, and Ritter. In particular, the film uses Stewart's face as a cornerstone of its visual style, showing him watching things and then relying on his glances and looks to motivate the cuts back to the courtyard.

The film is rightly celebrated for its opening shot, a very long and sinuous tracking movement that sweeps across the whole courtyard, spending a moment focusing on every one of the six "featured" apartments before turning itself back into Jeff's apartment, and then giving us the backstory through a few choice symbols: a mangled camera, a photograph of a race car barreling down upon the photographer, a leg in a cast, a negative of Grace Kelly, a positive print of that negative on a magazine cover. Without a single line of dialogue, we know all we need to know about what got us to this point, who Jeff is, and who Lisa is. And then, somewhat disappointingly, the second scene is a completely redundant phone conversation repeating it all, while also adding the minimal information that Jeff travels abroad a lot. It is the film's only misjudged bum note (another bum note: near the end, when Jeff fall out of his window, we are treated to the single worst rear-projection shot of all the notoriously bad rear-projection shots in the director's canon. But since that wasn't a "choice", I don't like to count it).

Anyway, the thing that's easy to praise about this is its economy: we learn all of the exposition and get a sense of the setting in a purely visual way. What's less obvious, I think, is that this one long shot has done all the work of training us how to watch this movie: every location we will see over the next two hours has been covered, and because it was all done in a tracking shot, we can see exactly how they all fit together. The film uses smaller repeats of this shot a few more times, both to give it some structure, and also I think to remind us of how everything is laid out. And this is so that when Stewart looks at something, we know exactly where he's looking, and so when we cut back to the wide shots, we intuitively follow his gaze to whatever specific part of the huge composition caught his attention. It's miraculous how well it works - it is a combination of composition and editing and blocking to provide us with a huge amount of visual information that's also easy to parse instantaneously. That is pure Cinema at its most refined and effective - a perfect aesthetic for the ultimate movie about what we do when we watch movies.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.