Rear Window (1954)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Sometimes I think that artists, actors, directors, comedians, musicians, poets, and baseball players (and probably a lot of other categories of people, too) can be underrated because people see something really prominent that they do very well, and miss something more important but less prominent that they do even better. I’m persuaded that that’s the case with Alfred Hitchcock, whose films we’ve featured at Word and Song several times, and I’ve said as much, too.

Hitchcock never won an Oscar, and I suspect that one of the reasons may have been that the critics thought a bit too much about his famously daring camera-shots — such as the windmill scene or the downed airplane scene in Foreign Correspondent, or the nail-biting scramble over the heads of the presidents on Mount Rushmore, in North by Northwest. They could thus put Hitch’s movies in a category of cleverness, and they certainly are that. But they are also profound studies of human motivation: of sin, and guilt, and innocence, and the many ways we get other people wrong, because we see what is not there, and we miss what is.

In a sense, our Film of the Week, Rear Window, is the mirror image of The Wrong Man, in which a perfectly innocent man happens to look like the culprit of an armed robbery, and his unwitting behavior — he’s hard up for money, and he fidgets a little — confirms the suspicions of people who were witnesses to the crime. In Rear Window, a man who otherwise looks like an ordinary and rather boring fellow — unless you look closely at his face, which is mask-like and menacing — is guilty of a peculiarly sanguinary murder.

I’d say, “Oh no, I’ve given away a spoiler,” except that I suspect that most of our readers will already know the basic plot of Rear Window. The murderer isn’t the focus of the movie. Those who are spying on him are. The setup is quite clever. L. B. Jeffries (James Stewart, in one of his two or three greatest performances) is a journalistic photographer by trade, whose work has taken him all over the world, into strange and dangerous places. But right now, after he broke his leg in a photo-shoot at a car race, he is laid up in his apartment in Greenwich Village. He has a nurse, Stella, who drops in every day (Thelma Ritter, at her best), a girl friend, Lisa, a high society girl who loves Jeff and wants to marry him (Grace Kelly, radiant as ever), a camera with a zoom lens, and a big wide rear window that looks out over a narrow courtyard into the windows of a dozen or so apartments opposite.

Since Jeff has nothing else to do all day, he’s taken to people-watching, guessing at the private lives of the various tenants he sees, and even giving them names, like poor “Miss Lonelyhearts,” who sometimes pretends to be having dinner with a male caller, as we see in pantomime, or the Newlyweds, the strains of whose first argument in their married life we hear over the distance. And then he sees Mr. Thorvald (Raymond Burr), a traveling salesman with an invalid wife who despises him, and we can hear the gruff and shrill back-and-forth of a man and a woman in bondage to hatred, jealousy, resentment, sorrow, and revenge.

The obvious question is one that we don’t ask at all. It has to be brought up indirectly, by the characters themselves. It is this: Why are we watching these people at all? Why should we pay any attention to what they are doing? Call it one of the worse reflexes of our fallen humanity. We are meant to be interested in other people. Isn’t that why we watch films in the first place, or read novels? “I’m a human being,” says Terence’s hero in the ancient Roman play The Self-Tormentor, “so I consider nothing human to be strange to me.” “I am involved in mankind,” says John Donne. But it’s one thing to get yourself wrapped up in the life of someone else. It’s another to do so uninvited. And it’s still another to do so, as a spy, interpreting someone else’s behavior in the worst light. It does happen that Thorvald is guilty. Does that let us off the hook?

In the middle of the film, Jeff manages to persuade a friend of his, a police detective, to check up on the man and to find out why Mrs. Thorvald hasn’t been there to be seen for a day or two. He does, and the evidence suggests that the invalid wife has gone on a train to visit her relatives in another city. Jeff doesn’t believe it. But what Lisa says is unanswerable: “Jeff, you know if someone came in here, they wouldn’t believe what they’d see. You and me with long faces plunged into despair because we find out a man didn’t kill his wife. We’re two of the most frightening ghouls I’ve ever known.”

And there’s the trouble, right? We are led by a train of suppositions to believe that Thorvald has butchered his wife and gotten rid of the body. Once we come to that conclusion, we want it to be confirmed: our pride takes over, or stubbornness, or something worse, a strange delight in seeing the worst and having the worst turn out to be true. So while Jeff and Lisa and Stella are working out whether there was a crime, how it was done, and how the body was disposed of, and Lisa even puts her life at risk to gain some physical evidence, we are watching them as they watch; and every question that is directed at them is directed also at us. Why are we watching? What are we “hoping” for? And there comes a moment in the film, a moment of silence and sudden awareness, when Thorvald looks through his rear window and sees Jeff’s window, and in a flash, he draws the correct conclusion: I have been discovered.

It’s easy to say that you’re all right, because your enemy is wicked; but no, that won’t do. We are to love our enemies, and love, though not blind, does not desire to believe the worst, and it places the most merciful construction on the words and the deeds of others, even upon the guilty. Hitchcock was a practicing Roman Catholic all his life. I won’t get into the details — I’ll only say that you couldn’t be such, in his time and place, without regular and thorough examination of conscience. If we are honest about that, and we can imagine that Hitchcock could be a relentless tracker of human motives, we are like spies into the human soul, except that it’s our own. The last frontier? The undiscovered country? No need to travel to Borneo or Kamchatka for that, Hitchcock might say. Just look in the mirror.

This week’s film is available at Internet Archive. Click on the poster to watch. Note: IA is now asking for donations, but they are still free to use. You can scroll down to the play arrow and start the film at no charge.

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