Rear Window

By the time I reached REAR WINDOW, the last of the consensus-great Hitchcock films I hadn't seen, it became apparent to me that Hitchcock does not have a "best" film. While I watched it, I recognized old feelings that Hitchcock had arisen within me in his other films. Namely, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, VERTIGO, TO CATCH A THIEF, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, DIAL M FOR MURDER, and NOTORIOUS. I realize now that Hitchcock's "best" films each do something great in a different light. In REAR WINDOW, for example, voyeurism and a contained space is used brilliantly. But this is very unlike NORTH BY NORTHWEST, which is epic in scale. REAR WINDOW, the 1957 film by Hitchcock, was filmed on a set built by Hitchcock that comprises of the apartment buildings' façades, and a garden between them. Inside of the buildings, L.B. Jefferies, a photographer, sits in a wheelchair with a broken leg. He is quite bored, but looks out his window incessantly at his neighbors; each of which he has learned something about in the past weeks. Jefferies (played by a dark, but pleasant James Stewart) has this routine interrupted by a nurse named Stella (Thelma Ritter) and his girlfriend / fiancé whom he does not wish to marry, but loves. She is obsessed with dresses as a model, wearing a different, expensive one every day. She is played by Grace Kelly: a perfect Hitchcock icy blonde. Jefferies remarks on his observations to these two women, and one night, while obsessively looking through a telephoto lens at a neighbor, he sees what he thinks to be a murder. He does not actually see the murder take place, but sees a broken series of events / images. This is what we, the audience do as well. We see broken pieces of a story and piece them together, and like Jefferies (who is immobile) in this case, we are unable to do anything about what we see through the lens. Jefferies, however, has these two women at his disposal, who eventually develop his ideas within their minds as if they were convinced audience members. Jefferies watches these women venture out into danger, and we feel his anguish at being immobile. Hitchcock's use of a subdued setting and suspense here is masterful.
Rear Window: ★★★★