The hero of Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" is trapped in a wheelchair, and the audience are trapped too right from the onset--trapped inside his point of view, inside his lack of freedom and his limited options. He passes his long days and nights by shamelessly maintaining a secret watch on his neighbors and we share his obsession.
The man is a famous photographer named L.B. Jeffries who never leaves his apartment over the course of the film and has only two regular visitors. One is his visiting nurse Stella and the other is his fiancée, Lisa Fremont, an elegant model and dress designer, who despairs of Jeffries who would rather look at the lives of others than live inside his own skin.
Jeff's apartment window shares a courtyard with many other windows and as the days pass he becomes familiar with some of the other tenants. There is Miss Lonelyhearts, who throws dinner parties for imaginary gentleman callers; Miss Torso, who throws drinks parties for several guys at a time; a couple who lower their beloved little dog in a basket to the garden, and a composer who fears his career is going nowhere. Then there is Thorvald, a man with a wife who spends all her days in bed and makes life miserable for him. One day the wife is no longer to be seen, and by piecing together several clues (a saw, a suitcase, a newly dug spot in Thorvald's courtyard garden), Jeff begins to suspect that a murder has taken place.
The way he determines this illustrates the method of the movie. Rarely has any film so boldly presented its methods in plain view. Jeff sits in his wheelchair, holding a camera with a telephoto lens, and looks first here and then there, like a movie camera would. What he sees, we see. What conclusions he draws, we draw--all without words, because the pictures add up to a montage of suspicion.
In "Rear Window," Jeff is not a moralist, a policeman or a do-gooder, but a man who likes to look. There are crucial moments in the film where he is clearly required to act, and he delays, not because he doesn't care what happens, but because he forgets he can be an active player; he is absorbed in a passive role.
This level of danger and suspense is so far elevated above the cheap thrills of the modern slasher films that "Rear Window," intended as entertainment in 1954, is now revered as a masterclass in suspense. Hitchcock long ago explained the difference between surprise and suspense. A bomb under a table goes off, and that's surprise. We know the bomb is under the table but not when it will go off, and that's suspense. Modern slasher films depend on danger that leaps unexpectedly out of the shadows. Surprise. "Rear Window" lovingly invests in suspense all through the film, inviting the viewer onto a foreplay of clue-building and high stakes suspense before the actual danger shows up at the doorstep.
In conclusion, Rear Window is Hitchcock at his masterful-wicked best and seldom has film history seen another man with his capabilities of holding viewers to edge-of-the-seat suspense.
Jabir Mahmood Chowdhury
Editor-in-chief
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