The first film I saw for this little experiment is Rear Window. I debated for awhile whether I should get something a bit further down the list instead of going after the greats, and in the end my curiosity won out. You have no idea how glad I am for that. Rear Window is everything I was hoping for and so much more.
Here we have an entire story told from the small apartment of L.B. Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart), an invalid bored into peeping in his neighbors’ windows. Nearly two hours of Jeffries looking out the window and observing what’s going on. He looks out the window, we see what he sees, then we see Jeffries’ reaction. How boring, how stale, how lifeless this must be.
And yet, Hitchcock made it work. Not just work, work brilliantly.
The basics of the story: Jeffries is a photojournalist laid up with a broken leg in the middle of a heat wave. From the window of his Greenwich Village apartment, he sees inside their apartments and suspects one of them of murder. Now if only he could prove it.
Three other players enter Jeffries’ apartment to share in his speculation. His girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (played by the divine Grace Kelly) is frustrated by his reluctance to marry her. His nurse, Stella (five time Oscar nominee Thelma Ritter) is frustrated by his attitude. And his old war buddy, Detective Doyle (Wendell Corey) is frustrated by Jeffries’ insistence that there’s been a murder in the first place.
It would be tempting to say that all the other characters in the film are inconsequential. With two brief exceptions they have nothing important to say. Usually their words are muffled and unintelligible. Most of the time their lives don’t seem to matter to the story. But upon reflection, it’s the believability of these strangers’ lives whose names we don’t even know that bring the film to life.
There’s the newlywed couple who spends all their time with the shade drawn. (Imagine this being done today. We’d have silhouettes of their writhing bodies and a steady soundtrack of moans and bedsprings squeaking.) There’s “Miss Torso”, the ballet dancer who stretches in the kitchen, just on the edge of being risqué. The frustrated composer is across the way trying to write his masterpiece. “Miss Lonelyhearts” is a failure at love and just upstairs a traveling salesman is arguing with his wife.
Alfred Hitchcock truly understood how to draw the audience in, how to pull them out of the theater and into the story. He used little things, things like these other lives that we can identify with and conspire with Jeffries to watch. Things like the lack of a musical score. That’s right, there’s no music to ratchet up the suspense just in case the audience doesn’t “get it”. Oh, there’s music, and sometimes it helps tell the story, but it’s always heard from across the courtyard in someone’s apartment, mixed in with car horns honking, sirens blaring, dogs barking, children fighting.
One touch that would be easy to overlook is the way in which Hitchcock made the audience draw conclusions with Jeffries. So much of the film is reaction that it was imperative that the audience be a co-conspirator with him. At the same time, it’s always important that the audience not be spoon-fed.
For example, the composer’s frustration is most clear when he’s vacuuming the rug in the middle of the night. In his underwear. He shoves the vacuum cleaner back and forth in front of the piano, then has a sudden inspiration. He stops the sweeper, and tries a new harmony on the piano, running back and forth from a chord to the troublesome next note. But it doesn’t work, so he goes back to sweeping. As the camera pans over the other buildings, we hear him trying again, pounding out the notes.
And so we see his frustration at being so close to progress on his piece. Situations play out with other characters, incidental and otherwise (I’m trying to stay relatively spoiler-free), so that Jeffries never has to say to himself, “Boy he sure is having trouble composing that piece of music.” A lesser filmmaker wouldn’t have been able to make it work, being either too vague or too explicit. Hitchcock knew the balance.
I’ve come all this way and I’ve barely mentioned the actors! Such a wonderful cast, I don’t know where to begin. I know Jimmy Stewart from his later life (mostly from Dana Carvey bits on Saturday Night Live), so finding him so powerful, even in this wheelchair, at age 46 was a surprise. Grace Kelly-what can I say? She’s a goddess. Lisa’s relationship with Jeffries was instrumental in making this film work. They exuded a special kind of love for each other, a comfortable love that was apparent in their every gesture, in every joke, even in their arguments. Thelma Ritter’s Stella is a good source of comic relief as well as being a source of wisdom in the film. I’d not heard of Ritter before; I’ll have to make sure her other films are on the Review List.
Hollywood doesn’t make films like this anymore. I’m still smiling from it, and I can’t wait to loan it out to friends. Make sure you get the restored Collector’s Edition. The script, which includes scenes that didn’t make it into the film, is included on the DVD-ROM.
SIMPSONS SIGHTING!
Season 6, Bart of Darkness
