The Fedora Chronicles - The Golden Age Of Hollywood: Rear Window

Rear Window
Release date 1st August 1954
Country : USA
Running time : 112 mins
Genre : Thriller
Starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr
Screenplay by John Michael Hayes
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

An invalid photographer believes a murder has taken place in the apartment opposite his own.

If one film sums up Hitchcock's style of cinema this is probably it. The film builds on the restrictions which possibly went too far in Rope (1948) of limiting your action to specific locales, the film concentrates on what is seen out of James Stewart's window, it is an incredibly visual movie. The first instance of this is in the close-up of Grace Kelly's beautiful face seen from Stewart's point of view. The set for the backdoor set of flats is extraordinary and incorporates a whole world in miniature. Hitchcock almost boils cinema down to its essentials here, in that all watchers could be seen as peering into a private world. Other films have been about voyeurism but never has it been so central to the plot and how it progresses, the idea of whether what others do in their apartments is private is questioned by Stewart's continued assertion that something is wrong, that Raymond Burr is behaving very suspiciously. Hitchcock may be saying we are voyeurs but don't think much about what our senses tell us, if we do and find something like murder perhaps it has some justification ?

At the time the set for the film was the largest indoor one ever created at Paramount studios.

The apartments were very real : they had electricity and running water and could be lived in.

DVD available from Universal Home Video :

DVD Movie Guide
DVD Verdict
DVD Beaver

27 25

Rear Window poster from
http://www.soundtrackcollector.com/