Rear Window (PG, 1954)

Jeff (James Stewart), a photojournalist, 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, Jeff amuses himself by spying on his neighbors across the courtyard, from his rear window. Jeff finds that each tenant, some lonely, some oversexed, 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 and a solitary bachelorette going dateless night after night. But then there's a burly guy named Lars (Perry Mason's Raymond Burr), unhappily married to a nag. Jeff becomes convinced that Lars has just snapped and murdered his wife, then possibly dismembered her body in packing cases. But is Jeff correct? And how can he convince someone? And what if the menacing Lars discovers he's been watched?

Whole college courses have centered around Alfred Hitchcock's fiendish, compact, and sometimes lighthearted REAR WINDOW. The tension gets so exquisite that viewers unaware of this film's reputation might almost miss the cinematic gimmick that made Rear Window quite an achievement: it never leaves Jeff's room. Not once. The POV outside Jeff's rear window into the other windows is like looking into an array of TV screens (or comic-strip panels), the little New York stories unfolding in each one, often simultaneously (and, yes, that's Ross Bagdassarian, creator of the cartoon characters Alvin & the Chipmunks, as a songwriter).

Throughout his career James Stewart was an a boyishly all-American good guy, though there were a few exceptions, and Hitchcock especially likes to tap into an inner darkness using the wholesome actor. Though he's partially a victim of his disability, Jeff does seem to enjoy being what could be called a "peeping Tom," and there's a question of whether his new pastime of voyeurism is a healthy one or not -- never mind the crime-solving fringe benefits -- and what's the deal with him enjoying looking at strangers, but avoiding intimacy with the beautiful, accommodating Lisa? If wanting to watch makes Jeff some sort of pervert, what does that make us, the audience? We're watching him -- watching them!