What did people do around the house before there was television to watch at night? Perhaps sit in an apartment by a window that overlooked a courtyard filled with other apartment windows and each window had its own story to tell. What if one of the stories going on through one of those windows is murder? Rear Window about voyeurism pure and simple. both the entertaining side and its most unseemly side. Due to a fractured leg and confined to a wheel chair, Jimmy Stewart gets up close and personal with his neighbors but the stories are from a distance, enhanced through binoculars and a huge telephoto camera lense. Whatever he doesn't know about the lives of his neighbors he just fills in the blanks. Lives out of context. But when one of the neighbors acts suspiciously like he murdered his invalid nagging wife, the voyeurism steps into the direction of a murder mystery.
Stewart gets Grace Kelley and Thelma Ritter as his girlfriend and nurse to do his leg work. He calls on the services of a police chum to serve as the go-between with the cops as the mystery unfolds. Rear Window is a film by Alfred Hitchcock. A film about voyearism would most likely be looked at as an underbelly unsettling type of film. In the hands of Hitchcock, Rear Window is a masterpiece for taking the unseemly topic and adding black comedy, drama, sadness, tragedy, suspense, and in the end, a mystery. Every life is a story. Hitchcock allows glimpses of everyone's story whether real or imagined.
I'm not a fan of Alfred Hitchcock. The films he is most noted for - Psycho or The Birds, I find too disturbing to enjoy. But I have enjoyed Rear Window several times through the years. Sometimes unsettling paintings on museum walls are works of art as well. Rear Window is a work of art by a master craftsman.
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