by Julian Spivey

When it comes to classic movies there are two categories: Alfred Hitchcock movies and everything else. Hitchcock named by Entertainment Weekly as the greatest director of all-time had an amazing career that spanned over fifty years and produced many of the greatest films ever made. Hitchcock’s movies are like a great rock song. They start out slow and build to a quicker, raucous pace. Rear Window (1954) is one of Hitchcock’s most renowned films. The American Film Institute ranked it forty-second on its list of the one-hundred greatest movies of all-time.

Rear Window, screenplay by John Michael Hayes and based on the Cornell Woolrich story It Had to Be Murder, starts out in the apartment of LB “Jeff” Jeffries and never leaves as the entire movie is filmed brilliantly inside the apartment and more importantly through the eyes of the rear window. The film stars James Stewart as Jeffries, a photographer who is recovering from a broken leg suffered when photographing a car race. Jeffries is struggling with life in a cast and is confined to his room and begins the bad habit or being a “Peeping Tom.” Day after day Jeffries spies on the lives of his neighbors, until he begins to suspect that one of his neighbors, Lars Thorwald played by Raymond Burr, murdered his wife. Rear Window co-stars the beautiful Grace Kelly, as Jeffries’ sophisticated high-class girlfriend, Lisa Carol Fremont, and Thelma Ritter, as his sarcastic, witty nurse, Stella. Lisa and Stella help Jeffries pursue his belief that Thorwald murdered his wife. The suspense of Rear Window leads right up to the film’s final nerve-racking moments.

In Rear Window, Hitchcock virtually perfects the voyeuristic “Peeping Tom” movie, something that he would do again in 1960s Psycho. As in most Hitchcock movies the terror lies in what is not seen in Rear Window with the possible gruesome murder of Mrs. Thorwald. Hitchcock has a habit of filming murders off-screen in his movies thus making the actor’s dialogue and the viewer’s imagination fill in the rest.