The dead of summer is probably the best time to kill your bed-sick wife. No one will judge you. It's too damn hot out! We can't all live through it. (R.I.P. Celeste Holm.)
Rear Window is, among other superlatives, the perfect August movie. Just as Alfred Hitchcock opens the curtains on the lives of wheelchair-confined photographer L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart), his terribly gorgeous model girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), and wisecracking home-care nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), we're already ankle-deep in the acrid stank of August. The neighbors in our hero's Greenwich Village apartment complex are sweaty, stir-crazy, and easily seen through their agape windows, and it's not long before L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries finds himself whipping out his binoculars and spying on his fellow tenants' mundane existences. Isn't that what we're all doing right now? Blasting the air conditioner, creeping onto Facebook, and hoping to find out that the Raymond Burrs in our lives are murdering their wives? It'd give us something to think about besides McKayla Maroney's frosty smirk, right?
Rear Window is one of my three fave movies along with previous "Best Movie Ever?" nominees Clue and Airplane!. Though it's a traditional Hitchcock thriller, it also includes sumptuous portions of comedy, romantic insight, psychological insight, and magnificent style. This movie gets it. And it's a rightful nominee for "Best Movie Ever" not just because it has ranked twice within the Top 50 of the American Film Institutes "100 Greatest Films," but because of the following five sacred attributes. You don't need binoculars to see that Rear Window is a timeless success. Let's extol:
1. Those spitfire one-liners
Though Rear Window is about a trio of onlookers who discover that an aloof neighbor Lars Thorward (Raymond Burr) may have murdered his wife, it's also a source of constant quippage. James Stewart, Grace Kelly, and Thelma Ritter plow through witty asides like Cheers patrons, but never once is their badinage hammy or insincere. Ritter, cinema's greatest soubrette, fires off handfuls of thoughtful knee-slappers. My two favorites: "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 "When I married Miles, we were both a couple of maladjusted misfits. We are still maladjusted misfits, and we have loved every minute of it." Grace Kelly gets in a great line when she and Jeff find themselves doubting their suspicions about Thorwald: "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 Stewart, whose character is on the fence about marrying Lisa, is mysteriously a complete natural at making Grace Kelly sound less than desirable: "She's too perfect, she's too talented, she's too beautiful, she's too sophisticated, she's too everything but what I want." This is Hitchcock's funniest film. Take that, The Trouble With Harry! (Though the fake-ass skiing scenes in Spellbound are pretty unintentionally hilarious, admittedly.)
2. Grace Kelly is at her most ravishing and bad-ass.
Every once in awhile I hear someone claim that Grace Kelly can't act, and it feels like a punch in the gut. You can claim that her Oscar win for the grim and dull The Country Girl was stupid (and it was), and you can even claim that she was disappointing in High Noon, but you can't dismiss her work in any of Alfred Hitchcock's movies. Though Hitch was rather famously obsessed with her, he also clearly believed in her gut abilities as a thespian. In Dial M For Murder, her elegance gave way to credible terror and exasperation. In To Catch a Thief, her regality concealed a sly savvy. And in Rear Window, Grace Kelly is challenged to prove her validity as a paramour to James Stewart's character, and she succeeds by at first submitting to his investigative schemes, offering unabashedly feminine intuition to help his case, and then -- at last -- defying his orders, vaulting herself into danger, and proving she's just as compelling a muse as a damn murderer. That kind of showstopping self-objectification? Is also what I love about Madonna. Yes, that's right: Grace Kelly used perilous, attention-grasping flair in Rear Window and thereby invented Madonna. She's nervy and oozing chutzpah, and no actress of the day could've sold those qualities like Grace Kelly.
She's also funny and relatable here, letting her subtly maternal energy shine. And while everyone loves to gush about her truly incomparable beauty, I'd like to add that Grace Kelly has an astonishing speaking voice. Commanding, somewhat austere, and crystal clear. And her wardrobe in this film? Form-fitting fire. You work that Edith Head ensemble like a thundering cone bra and make all the heterosexual men stop, shut the hell up, and listen, Ms. Grace.
3. It is scary!
Hitch deliberately freaked us out with graphic strangulation scenes in Frenzy, erratic knife choreography in Psycho, and Martin Landau's crazy-ass eyes in North By Northwest, but the single scariest moment in any of his movies has to be in Rear Window when Jeff picks up the phone in his apartment, starts gabbing to who he thinks is his pal Lt. Doyle (Wendell Corey), and suddenly realizes that it's the murderer Thorwald on the other line. Such an unexpected moment of terror -- and one that's followed by Thorwald's last-ditch attempt to kill Jeff in his apartment. Shivers! Weren't we just blabbing about marriage with Thelma Ritter a minute ago? This movie has so many levels of intrigue, and its climax is a killer culmination of all the paranoia preceding it.
4. This is a play-like setting done right.
I mentioned Clue earlier, and I'd compare one of its best attributes to Rear Window: Both take place in one contained space and make that space come alive. Rear Window's apartment complex set is kind of gigantic (and it was largest ever constructed effort for Paramount at the time), but we're claustrophobically tucked inside Jeff's flat for the film's entire runtime. I love how we only get to peer into Jeff's neighbors' homes from the outside. That unchanging perspective makes Rear Window seem less like a Hollywood production and more like real life. We're experiencing as much of the visual space as the main characters are, and in the same way. I think that's a big part of why the movie's characters feel so genuine: We relate to them because there's no omniscient narrator or shifting perspective to pull us away from experiencing what they're experiencing.
5. It's Hitchcock's best movie. Full stop.
Recently, the UK's Sight & Sound magazine upheld its tradition of polling a bunch of critics about their all-time favorite films. For the first time ever, Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 psychological caper Vertigo pulled ahead of Citizen Kane for the collective #1 spot. I like Vertigo, but I have some slight problems with it: 1) The overlength. 2) I'd say it's one of James Stewart's more static performances. 3) You have to be kidding me that Stewart's character wouldn't immediately realize that Kim Novak just dyed her hair brown and pretended to be dead. I'm sorry, but that's hilariously implausible. Rear Window is way less self-serious, way more suspenseful, and straight-up more fun. Here's how I'd rank Hitch's movies.
1. Rear Window
2. Rebecca (<3 Fontaine, Olivier, Anderson)
3. Notorious (all-around fabulous)
4. The Lady Vanishes (Agatha Christie had to have been jealous of this pitch-perfect train-set whodunit.)
5. Psycho (<3 my Tony)
6. Vertigo (spirals of story threads!)
7. Shadow of A Doubt (avuncular murdering!)
8. Lifeboat (Tallulah, dammit!)
9. Frenzy (graphic!)
10. North By Northwest (Eva Marie Saint is eternally fabulous, even while dangling off national landmarks)
Is Rear Window your favorite Hitch movie too? Enlighten me or I'll blind you with camera flashes.
Check out more of our Best Movie Ever! selections here.
