Let’s come right out and say it: Rear Window is probably not only Alfred Hitchcock’s most widely beloved work, but it could also be his greatest cinematic achievement. That may sound like heresy among critics, scholars, and filmmakers who participate in the Sight and Sound poll every decade and frequently anoint Vertigo as the master’s crown jewel. But truth be told, Rear Window checks a lot more boxes for a lot more people.
Originally released on August 4, 1954, Rear Window tells the story of L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies, a professional photographer confined to a wheelchair in his apartment after breaking his leg. Bored and immobilized, Jeff (James Stewart) begins to spy on his neighbors through his back window, becoming increasingly convinced that one of them, Lars Thorwald (Raymond burr), has murdered his wife. As he delves deeper into his suspicions, enlisting the help of his girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and his nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), the tension mounts, leading to a suspenseful climax that puts Jeff's life at risk.
Click here to listen to a recording of our CineVerse group discussion of Rear Window, conducted earlier this month; to hear the latest Cineversary podcast episode that celebrates Rear Window’s 70th anniversary, click here.
Rear Window is often ranked among the greatest films ever made. The American Film Institute included Rear Window as number 42 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies, number 14 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills, number 48 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition), and number three in AFI's 10 Top 10 (Mysteries). In 1998, Time Out magazine conducted a poll, and the film was voted the 21st greatest of all time. In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made, Rear Window was ranked 53rd among critics and 48th among directors. In 2017, Empire magazine's readers' poll placed Rear Window at No. 72 on its list of The 100 Greatest Movies. The 2022 edition of the magazine's Greatest Films of All Time list ranked the film 38th in the critics poll. Additionally, in 2022, Time Out magazine ranked the film at No. 26 on their list of "The 100 Best Thriller Films of All Time."
When evaluating the specific elements that elevate Rear Window from a great movie to an all-time masterpiece, consider that it satisfies on multiple levels: serving as thrilling popcorn movie escapism, a mystery thriller in which you, like Jeff, try to piece together clues to solve a crime and catch a killer, and a meta film study of the way we the audience watch movies and engage in an active voyeurism as Jeff does. The film also benefits enormously from efficient storytelling. Much of its power lies in its ability to show with telling; to use images and what they call “pure cinema” to convey its narrative visually, without having to resort to unnecessary or lengthy exposition via dialogue or narration.
Hitchcock's best works often employ pure cinema techniques, including the use of masterfully framed visuals, careful juxtapositions via editing, and creative sound design to provide information to the viewer that would otherwise be given via excessively talky dialogue or voiceover narration. Despite its confined setting, subjective point of view, and lack of dialogue, Rear Window fully exploits the power of pure cinema and its ability to provide an immersive and intelligent experience and evoke a strong emotional response better than virtually any other art form.
Exhibit A: The opening shots, which, without any dialogue or actors, immediately establish the situation, characters, and atmosphere in short order. We begin with a title sequence over a window whose blinds rise to reveal a courtyard and the apartments within. The camera pans across the courtyard, showing various residents and their activities, then shifts to Jeff's apartment, where details like a thermometer, his leg in a cast, and scattered photographic equipment hint at his profession and injury. The sequence concludes by returning to Jeff's view from the window, emphasizing his perspective and foreshadowing his voyeuristic role.
Exhibit B: Scenes where Jeff is spying on his neighbors and observing what he believes to be suspicious behavior. Instead of using dialogue to explain Jeff's suspicions, Hitchcock relies on a series of visual cues. The camera frequently shifts to Jeff’s point of view through his binoculars or camera lens, allowing the audience to see exactly what he sees. This visual perspective builds tension and conveys his growing suspicion without verbal explanation. Through close-ups and wide shots, we observe the neighbors' actions and interactions, such as the mysterious man packing a trunk or the woman in the apartment across the courtyard who seems distressed. These visuals create a narrative of intrigue and suspicion based on Jeff’s observations. Jeff’s reactions to these observations, including his increasingly concerned expressions and the frantic use of his photographic equipment, convey his emotional state and the seriousness of his suspicions without needing explicit dialogue. This visual storytelling effectively immerses us in Jeff’s experience and the unfolding mystery, demonstrating Hitchcock’s skill in using imagery to advance the plot and build suspense.
Consider, too, what the film accomplishes with masterful tension techniques but without using any visible corpses, gore, or graphic violence. Hitchcock earns our attention and conjures feelings of unease, dread, and even horror by suggesting and organically building suspense.
Nearly the entire film is shown from Jeff’s point of view. Consequently, we identify with Jeff, who is immobile, and—except for only a few shots—we only see and hear what he sees and hears, making us complicit in his voyeurism. Even though what Jeff is doing is morally wrong and against the law, which makes him a less-than-admirable character, he still earns our undivided attention and serves as a reliable, identifiable audience surrogate.
By presenting Jeff as an injured and immobile captive spectator whose snooping and suspicions of Thorwald prove correct, which makes him a hero of sorts, Hitchcock not only skirts the censors of this era who would have required Jeff to be punished for these voyeuristic sins but also makes this character a likable protagonist we can root for today. (Consider how Jeff is punished, in a way, by ending up with two broken legs by the conclusion.)
With perhaps one exception—the scene where he falls asleep as Thorwald and an unidentified female leave his apartment—we learn things as Jeff learns them, making us dependent on his voyeurism to ascertain new information. Additionally, almost every scene of the film is shown from inside Jeff’s apartment, adding to the claustrophobia and dependence we have on his POV.
Our protagonist isn’t the typical Hitchcock “wrong man accused” or person tangled up in dangerous affairs like Cary Grant in “North by Northwest.” Salon critic Charles Taylor
wrote: “He’s not personally involved in the crime. He isn’t horrified or frightened, or motivated by a sense of justice or outrage over a woman’s death; he’s turned on, which is made a bit too obvious by his use of a huge, phallic zoom lens to do his peeping.”
Rear Window also capably demonstrates Hitchcock’s great talent for audience manipulation. Case in point: You could argue that he makes us sympathize ever so slightly with the murdering husband by showing him at first being berated by her and, later, confronting Jeff by asking “What do you want from me?” as if he’s protesting the spying on him that Jeff and the audience have been doing.
The movie also exhibits Hitchcock's adept use of Kuleshov's theories on how editing shapes perception. Kuleshov, a Russian film theorist, illustrated that an actor's neutral expression could convey various emotions depending on the juxtaposed images. By alternating between shots of what Stewart sees (or thinks he sees) and his reactions, Hitchcock involves the audience in Stewart's voyeurism and emotional experience, transforming them into active participants in the story.
As in three of his earlier films—Dial M for Murder, Rope, and Lifeboat—the director confines the narrative primarily to a single set or location, in this case Jeff’s apartment. But unlike those latter two films, he isn’t afraid to break this rule here by bringing the camera outside the apartment and presenting closer shots of surrounding characters, such as when the dog owner chastises her neighbors after her pet is found dead or the close-up flashes of the neighbors we observe looking up at Jeff and Thorwald tussling.
While Hitch was already famous for memorable, protracted, and stylized kissing scenes between male and female leads in his films—as evidenced in Notorious and Dial M for Murder—here he gives us a dreamy, sensual slow-motion osculation between Kelly and Stewart. The execution is brilliant, as we first see Jeff in evening slumber next to his window; a shadow engulfs his face, and the camera cuts to an encroaching Lisa, radiantly adorned as she looks and smiles directly at the viewer, coming ever closer. Her approaching presence and overwhelming shadow seem to awaken Jeff, and she leans in for a sultry, slow-mo smooch in which those full, puckered lips punctuate the nighttime silence.
This could be Hitchcock’s most perfectly realized and airtight masterpiece. It doesn’t suffer from plot holes or crime implausibilities as Vertigo does; the female love interest has more gravitas and is more memorable than Eva Marie Saint’s character in North by Northwest; there’s no unnecessary scene like the psychobabble explanation tacked on to the end of Psycho; and the incredible set is more impressive than the set for Rope.
In fact, this was the largest and most elaborate and ambitious set Hitchcock—or Paramount Studios—had ever created. It included a full-scale courtyard and the rear facades of the surrounding apartments, replicating an authentic urban environment. The set measured approximately 98 feet wide, 185 feet long, and 40 feet high, with buildings reaching seven stories tall. This impressive scale enabled Hitchcock to achieve the film's distinctive visual style and maintain a high level of realism.
Another way Rear Window was innovative was in its extensive use of diegetic sound, with all audio originating within the film's environment; this immerses the audience in the protagonist's experience, enhancing the story's realism and immediacy. Reflect on how little music there is in the film. Mostly, we hear those sounds and songs that the characters generate and experience, not a traditional score. The ingenious sound design forces us to listen closely to faint, far-off noises and words coming from across the courtyard. Yes, music was written exclusively for the film, but veteran Hollywood composer Franz Waxman wove much of his score into the sound design to be played as background music heard by the characters.
An ideal cast further elevates Rear Window to the Hitchcock upper echelon. James Stewart, granted, is slightly too old for this part, but he interestingly plays a bit against type here; he established a likable guy screen persona in the 1930s and 1940s that begins to reveal a darker side by the late 1940s, and Hitchcock capitalizes on the actor’s range. Kelly is transcendently luminous in this role and, despite being about 20 years younger than Stewart, demonstrates palpable sex appeal and chemistry with her co-lead.
But perhaps the unsung hero among these thespians is Thelma Ritter as Jeff’s candid caretaker, who serves as a pseudo voice of conscience with lines like “We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change,” and “The New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse…And they got no windows in the workhouse.”
Among the films that could owe a debt to Rear Window are Peeping Tom (1960), Wait Until Dark (1967), The Bride Wore Black (1968), Night Watch (1973), The Conversation (1974), Someone’s Watching Me! (1978), Foul Play (1978), Blow Out (1981), Body Double (1984), The Bedroom Window (1987), Sliver (1993), Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Abominable (2006), Disturbia (2007), Stalked by My Neighbor (2015), The Woman in the Window (2021), The Voyeurs (2021), Watcher (2022), and Kimi (2022). There was also the mediocre 1998 TV movie remake starring Christopher Reeve.
Writing that it reveled “in the simultaneity of the 8 million stories in the Naked City,” The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman
credited Rear Window with being “the slyly alienated precursor of multiple narratives like Short Cuts or Magnolia.” The scene in No Country For Old Men where Llewelyn sits in the dark and awaits Chigurh—steadily approaching outside Llewelyn’s door—takes a cue or two from the scene in Rear Window where Jeff, sitting helplessly in the shadows, nervously anticipates Thorwald coming to his door.
Predecessors that may have influenced Rear Window include Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), The Window (1949), and Witness to Murder (1954).
Fun fact: Taylor Swift has referenced "Rear Window" multiple times, wearing a dress inspired by Edith Head's design for Grace Kelly in the "Me!" music video and citing the film's voyeuristic themes as an influence on her album Folklore.
The major message of Rear Window is fear of love and commitment. The murder mystery element of the story serves as the MacGuffin to propel the narrative, but ultimately it’s not the important takeaway here; this movie is all about Jeff and Lisa learning to coexist, compromise, and not take each other for granted. Jeff is an adventurous, widely traveled photographer who values his independence and possesses a cautious, cynical nature. He doubts that he and Lisa would be compatible long-term and, therefore, doesn’t reciprocate much affection with her.
Per Roger Ebert: “He is in love with the occupation of photography, and becomes completely absorbed in reconstructing the images he has seen through his lens. He wants what he can spy at a distance, not what he can hold in his arms.”
Lisa, by contrast, appears deeply in love with Jeff and is determined to make their relationship work. Lisa steps out of her comfort zone and actively participates in Jeff's investigation, proving her dedication and capability. She evolves from a seemingly superficial character into a brave and resourceful partner, taking on risky tasks that Jeff cannot perform. This shift demonstrates her adaptability and depth, moving beyond her initial portrayal as a glamorous socialite.
“When Lisa goes into the murderer's apartment, the proof she finds of his crime is his wife's wedding ring, which she places on her finger and points to for the benefit of the watching Jeff,”
wrote Jeremy Arnold, Rob Nixon, and Jeff Stafford in a collective article for TCM. “On one level, she's letting him know she found the vital clue; on another, she's challenging him (now that she's "proved" herself) to stop coming up with excuses and marry her.”
By showing courage, intelligence, and a willingness to engage with Jeff's world, Lisa bridges the gap between their differing lifestyles. As a result, Jeff starts to appreciate her qualities and reconsiders his reservations about their relationship, realizing the value of her companionship and support.
Every couple or individual in each different apartment window presents a different take on relationships and love or lack thereof, each commenting in a way about Jeff’s relationship with Lisa. Jeff doesn’t want to commit to Lisa; yet he sees things in many of his neighbors that mirror his feelings for or fears about her. Ponder, for example how Thorwald is irritated by a disabled, nagging spouse, and Jeff suspects Thorwald of murdering his wife—possibly a bit of subconscious wish fulfillment in Jeff's yearning to be free of Lisa.
John Belton, author of the book Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window,
wrote: “A common reading of the film views Jeff as a spectator figure and what he sees out his window as a screen upon which his own desires are projected…Thorwald functions as Jeff’s Id and the murder as the projection of Jeff’s unconscious desires to rid himself of Lisa...Jeff undergoes an Aristotlean catharsis that purges his fears about marriage…he has symbolically exorcised the demon within himself.”
Meanwhile, the newlyweds are copulating like rabbits; if Jeff’s broken leg is a symbol of impotence, perhaps he wishes he could be as virile and active as the newlywed husband and fears being able to perform with Lisa; to compensate for his impotence, Jeff uses an ostentatiously huge telephoto lens, a phallic symbol. And the itches he needs to scratch are like sudden sexual urges that—ahem—need release, if you know what I mean.
Ms. Torso stands as a voluptuous object of desire who enjoys wearing less clothing, contrasting with Lisa, a glamorous fashionista who adores clothing. Yet she and the other neighbors are mostly strangers to one another, disconnected and isolated from each other despite living nearby. Charles Taylor of Salon.com
posited: “It isn’t peeping that’s on trial here as much as the propensity of human beings to detach themselves from one another. The backyard world of "Rear Window" isn't a neighborhood -- merely a collection of people living in close proximity.”
Rear Window also ruminates heavily on voyeurism, scopophilia, and the practice of watching people as well as watching movies, television, or an entertainment screen. Window frames, hallways, and door frames symbolize the cinematic frame, as if each of these were a private movie choice for Jeff and the audience. Thorwald breaks this escapist viewing fantasy by figuratively stepping out of the screen, crossing that framing threshold, and literally trespassing into Jeff’s private world. Francois Truffaut surmised that “The courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses."
Alternate Ending blogger Tim Brayton
likened the window watching to “the prurient voyeurism of watching television: of sitting in your living room, bored out of your goddamned mind, blandly glancing from one square-shaped window on human beings framed in medium shots to the next, hoping that one of them will contain at least some amount of sex or violence…how that habit of treating humanity as nothing but spectacle, fodder to keep yourself distracted from your own life, can end up turning into something very grisly and unpleasant.”
Ultimately, this is a film “about a man who does on the screen what we do in the audience—look through a lens at the private lives of strangers,” wrote Roger Ebert.
Consider that Jeff and Lisa are so captivated by their own private cinema—watching Thorwald’s apartment—that they almost allow a nearby tenant to kill herself; later, Jeff can do little but watch as he sees Lisa threatened by Thorwald.
Big takeaway #3? The dark side of human nature may be closer than you think. Rear Window insinuates that even our next-door neighbors or the individuals in our community we would least suspect have a darkness within them: one of these nearby residents is a Peeping Tom; another is a cold-blooded killer. This latent darkness is exemplified by the shadows we continue to see fall across Jeff’s face. We observe how his visage becomes shaded when, for example, he wheels in and out of the light during his spying, when Lisa leans in upon his waking figure for a kiss, or when Thorwald enters Jeff’s apartment. Even Lisa casts a suggestively ominous shadow upon the ceiling.
“(Rear Window is) about the subterranean darkness beneath the surface of our lives, the world that few see…Beneath its surface, the film is a tense examination of the way we really are. It's not a flattering portrait,”
according to reviewer D.K. Holm. “There is, in fact, one undeniable reflection of Jeffries among all his neighbors: Thorwald. Besides Jeffries, he's the only other person in the film who looks intensely out his back window at his neighbors.” This implies that Jeff and Thorwald are opposite sides of the same problematic coin.
Human behavior is unpredictable, the film further teaches us. Recall how Miss Lonelyhearts prepares to commit suicide, Miss Torso ultimately chooses a nerdy, smaller man, Thorwald kills his wife and a dog, and Jeff’s supposedly delicate socialite girlfriend defies expectations by breaking into Thorwald’s apartment.
What is Rear Window’s greatest gift to viewers? As beneficiaries of Rear Windows’s substantial cinematic largesse, there are many valuable gifts we can point to. First, this has got to be the finest film ever created about the allure and dangers of voyeurism and the slippery slope that starts with relatively harmless distanced observing but can quickly devolve into active spying and surveillance of privacy rights-violated human beings. Just because Jeff’s suspicions about his shady neighbor prove correct doesn’t mean his methods for outing the evil are ethically acceptable. Hitchcock cleverly implicates every viewer watching Jeff watching others by making us as intrigued as Jeff is and forgiving of his actions, including using binoculars, a telephoto lens, the telephone, anonymous notes, and vulnerable trespassing surrogates like Lisa and Stella. Recall, too, how, even though he correctly recruits his detective crony to investigate, Jeff encourages violating constitutional rights and forgoing a search warrant. There have been countless classics that have creatively explored voyeuristic themes and plots—including Blow Out, Blue Velvet, Peeping Tom, The Conversation, Blow-Up, The Truman Show, The Lives of Others, and One-Hour Photo—but Rear Window tops them. That’s because Hitchcock knows how to best manipulate his audience and make them complicit in this spying as well as tolerant of a sympathetic yet deviant protagonist.
Rear Window’s second greatest gift? Not so secretly, it’s about sex, sex, and more sex: healthy, normal, and society-approved fornication as practiced by the newlyweds, exhibitionistic titillation evoked by Miss Torso upon any heterosexual male who lays eyes upon her, disturbing assault perpetrated upon Miss Lonelyhearts by her lascivious younger date—a cautionary reminder that violence often accompanies sex—and urbane seductiveness in the irresistible form of Lisa, who can fuel desire even with a tiny gesture or a perfectly delivered double entendre like “a preview of coming attractions.” Perhaps the most sensual shot in the film is not the lean-in kiss she awakens Jeff with but later—when the camera hovers across the courtyard, flitting from the half-naked composer to a presumably nude Miss Torso brushing her hair, past the drawn shade of the newlyweds’ bedroom and quickly over to Jeff and Lisa, embraced in a hot and heavy makeout session. Of all the suggestive portals in this scene or any others in the film, the lusty camera stops channel surfing for sex and finally and quickly lands upon the epicenter of eroticism in this entire community: Jeff’s own window. Turns out the most interesting people of all to spy on are the voyeurs themselves, one of whom wants to focus on healthy sex in the here and now and the preoccupied other who gets his kicks from watching strangers and living dangerously.
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