Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
What to add about Alfred Hitchcock's thriller classic REAR WINDOW? Whole college courses have centered around Alfred Hitchcock's fiendish, compact and sometimes lighthearted 1954 nail biter. Even in the lingo of the text-message generation, U should C it!
News photographer Jeff (James Stewart), is confined to a wheelchair after breaking his leg shooting a car race. Now he recuperates in his Greenwich Village flat, getting occasional visits from his gorgeous model-girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) and putting up with a visiting nurse. Bored by immobility and equipped with an arsenal of binoculars and telephoto SLR lenses within reach (even vintage as they were, how I salivated over those lenses during my own would-be photographer days), Jeff amuses himself by spying on his neighbors across the courtyard. Jeff finds that each tenant embodies a different pathology of male-female relationships. At first it's funny to Jeff, seeing a newlywed woman wearing down her husband with frequent lovemaking (broadly but coyly hinted at, nothing shown) and a solitary bachelorette going dateless night after night. But then there's a burly guy named Lars (Raymond Burr), unhappily married to a nag. Faraway clues and guesswork convince Jeff that Lars has just snapped and murdered his wife, then possibly dismembered her body in packing cases. But is Jeff correct in his dire assumptions? And how to convince anyone? And what if the menacing Lars discovers he's been watched?
