Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock) (Patreon)

95/100

Fourth viewing (at least), though it'd been almost 20 years. I'm gonna embrace the futility of coming up with a fresh angle on perhaps the most thoroughly analyzed film of all time (it's either this or Kane, I'd say) and just state the obvious: This is every bit as much a movie about the spectator stepping onto the screen—and, conversely, seeing fictional characters enter the real world—as is The Purple Rose of Cairo. Granted, Jeff has to enter the voyeur's paradise by proxy, sending Lisa on a scouting mission that she impulsively turns into a full-fledged home invasion; the horrified impotence he feels when Thorwald attacks her suggests (much more viscerally than does any De Palma setpiece, if you ask me) the degree to which we identify with those rectangle-inhabiting people we watch from a safe but sometimes barely discernible distance. And then, of course, it suggests that we're not so safe after all. Yet Thorwald entering Jeff's apartment somehow doesn't unnerve me nearly as much as our first view of Lisa in the courtyard. Partly that's because Burr plays Thorwald as more pathetic than menacing at first, while Hitchcock places Stewart deep in shadow and has him say nothing for an endless moment; that whole confrontation is Rear Window's one significant weakness, vacillating as it does between Jeff as victim and Jeff as a sort of emotional sadist (and then relying on the flashbulb gimmick, which works thematically but is otherwise less than inspired). Mostly, though, it's just that Hitchcock does such a magnificent job of creating the view from Jeff's window as frames-within-the-frame that suddenly seeing Lisa in the "wrong" film creates a startling rupture. 

Part of that effect, I assume, is accomplished via Technicolor—when I, suffering from protanomaly, notice that a movie's reds look unusually vivid, they must be very vivid indeed. (Blues, too, and I can feel much more confident there.) Even in black-and-white, though, this would still be a remarkable exercise in looking, with as much attention paid to the act itself as to what's being observed. At one point, Lisa, who's been chiding Jeff for letting his imagination run away with him, slowly stands up, looking toward the window; we see her see something, and Hitchcock then cuts not to her POV, but to a shot of Jeff seeing that she's seen something. Then to a two-shot of Lisa and Jeff staring straight ahead, with her standing out of focus in the background and him looking over his shoulder in the foreground. Then Jeff retrieves his binoculars, and only then do we see what Thorwald is up to (tying ropes around a large box). "Let's start from the beginning again, Jeff," she says, still staring out the window, as the camera pushes in for a close-up. "Tell me everything you saw...and what you think it means." Not exactly subtle, but it doesn't need to be. 

All credit to the French for first recognizing that none of this reflexive subtext is negated or cheapened by the presence of a ripping yarn on its surface. While it's more fun for me to write about Eyelines: The Movie, I still experience Rear Window first and foremost as a first-rate detective story/romance, plus whatever singular genre Thelma Ritter's presence automatically entails. There's virtually no fat on this thing, right from the opening pan around Jeff's apartment that wordlessly establishes his entire backstory, including the accident that put him in the cast. (It's so efficient that subsequent phone dialogue filling in the details feels superfluous.) When Jeff and Lisa part on bad terms, we next see them passionately kissing, the nature of their rapprochement having correctly been deemed of no importance. Indeed, that whole relationship takes me by surprise every time. I invariably start to bridle early on at what seems like the film's clear pro-Jeff agenda—even when he's being a bit of a jerk, it's by refusing to credit that Lisa might be made of hardier stuff than he assumes. And there is a sense in which she proves herself worthy by taking the action that he physically cannot. But I always forget that the last thing we see before the final fadeout is Lisa, "sensibly" dressed in loafers and jeans, setting down Beyond the High Himalayas and picking up a copy of Harper's Bazaar. The tug of war will continue.