Genres: Mystery | Thriller Countries: USA Actors: James Stewart L. B. Jefferies Grace Kelly Lisa Carol Fremont Wendell Corey Det. Lt. Thomas J. Doyle Thelma Ritter Stella Raymond Burr Lars Thorwald Judith Evelyn Miss Lonelyheart Ross Bagdasarian Songwriter Georgine Darcy Miss Torso Sara Berner Wife living above Thorwalds Frank Cady Husband living above Thorwalds Jesslyn Fax Sculpting neighbor with hearing aid Rand Harper Newlywed man Irene Winston Mrs. Anna Thorwald Havis Davenport Newlywed woman Marla English Girl at songwriter's party Directors: Alfred Hitchcock Certification: Argentina:13 | Australia:PG | Canada:A | Canada:G | Canada:PG | Chile:14 | Finland:K-8 | France:U ...  show all  Argentina:13 | Australia:PG | Canada:A | Canada:G | Canada:PG | Chile:14 | Finland:K-8 | France:U | Iceland:L | Netherlands:AL | Norway:16 | Peru:14 | Portugal:M/12 | Singapore:PG | South Korea:15 | Spain:T | UK:PG | USA:Approved | USA:PG | West Germany:12  hide  IMDB Rating: 8.8 out of 10 (83721 votes)

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Laid up with a broken leg, photojournalist L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) is confined to his tiny, sweltering courtyard apartment. To pass the time between visits from his nurse (Thelma Ritter) and his fashion model girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly), the binocular-wielding Jeffries stares through the rear window of his apartment at the goings-on in the other apartments around his courtyard. As he watches his neighbors, he assigns them such roles and character names as “Miss Torso” (Georgine Darcy), a professional dancer with a healthy social life or “Miss Lonelyhearts” (Judith Evelyn), a middle-aged woman who entertains nonexistent gentlemen callers. Of particular interest is seemingly mild-mannered travelling salesman Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), who is saddled with a nagging, invalid wife. One afternoon, Thorwald pulls down his window shade, and his wife’s incessant bray comes to a sudden halt. Out of boredom, Jeffries casually concocts a scenario in which Thorwald has murdered his wife and disposed of the body in gruesome fashion. Trouble is, Jeffries’ musings just might happen to be the truth. One of Alfred Hitchcock’s very best efforts, Rear Window is a crackling suspense film that also ranks with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) as one of the movies’ most trenchant dissections of voyeurism. As in most Hitchcock films, the protagonist is a seemingly ordinary man who gets himself in trouble for his secret desires.

On the surface a comic thriller about a photographer and the crime he thinks took place across the courtyard, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) turns into an interrogation of voyeurism and movie-viewing. Keeping the camera in Jeff’s apartment (except for a couple of shots near the climax), Hitchcock limits the audience’s view to what Jeff can see and hear from his immobilized perch. He is free to take in the spectacle of the events in the apartments that he sees, but he is powerless to intervene. Why he looks, however, is the larger question; Hitchcock suggests not just that Jeff is channel-surfing among apartments for idle entertainment but also that the urge to peep is a more universal trait than we might care to acknowledge. What Jeff finds, moreover, becomes a fantasy projection of his own fears about his own relationship with Lisa. Jeff becomes a voyeur to escape, but his gaze is literally — and violently — turned back on him by the suspected wife-killer in his thriller narrative. Wryly entertaining as well as skillfully executed and thematically complex, the popular Rear Window earned Hitchcock an Oscar nomination for Best Director and inspired such later films as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1973). It was remade in 1998 as a TV movie with Christopher Reeve in the James Stewart role.

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