It is somewhat hard to believe that Hitchcock's masterpiece Rear Window has its golden anniversary this year, and it's surprising largely because the "race of peeping toms" that Hitchcock so brilliantly brought to the screen in 1954 is still very much present today-the film doesn't feel so aged. Although fifty years ago it was somewhat of a taboo to discuss the themes of this film-marriage (or not wanting to marry) and what your neighbors are doing-Hitchcock ignored social convention. And today the latter of those themes is the focus of nearly every popular television show-the very core of reality television is to peek inside the lives of your neighbors, or at least those who could be your neighbors. Uniquely, this film has an old-fashioned modernity to it. It is urban, yet there is still a 1950s formality to its characters. It is definitely ahead of its time, but in 1954 I imagine it was not too difficult to break a few societal rules with the subject matter of a movie. And with this movie, it touched upon one of the most basic characteristics of human nature: the desire to find out what the guy (and gal) is doing next door. You can almost hear Hitch asking: "Well, don't we have a right to know?"

The film opens in the courtyard of a Greenwich Village apartment building complex, and then we gradually meet its inhabitants, but only visually: the camera pans from right to left, giving us a brief glimpse of each neighbor, from "Miss Lonelyheart" to the couple on the fire escape to "Miss Torso" (a dancer) to the Thorwalds to the Songwriter and then into the sweltering apartment of our everyman protagonist, L.B. Jeffries, played by the immortal everyman Jimmy Stewart. Jeffries is an adventurous photographer, as we learn, and he has been stuck in a "plaster cocoon" (a cast) for five weeks because he decided to attempt a photograph on an automobile racetrack and he reaped the consequences, a broken leg. He has a dutiful insurance-company nurse, Stella, who comes by everyday to massage him and spout advice about life, and Jeffries' girlfriend is none other than the beautiful Lisa Fremont, played by the ravishing Grace Kelly (who simply lights up every scene in which she appears).

Almost the first half of the movie is spent within Jeffries' apartment, mingling with these characters, learning about them-Hitchcock, above all, was a director about characters and their psyches. The three characters, together and in pairs, discuss relationships (Jeffries and Lisa), and marriage specifically, with Stella sardonically stating that Jeffries should "do something drastic, like get married." And on that note, Hitchcock's finest comic touch in this film is the newlywed couple that we watch move into an apartment across the back courtyard from Jeffries. Throughout the course of the film, we see through Jeffries' eyes the newlyweds' shade closed, the new husband appear at the window, sigh, begin to smoke, and then we hear his new wife almost immediately call to him, and then he grudgingly returns to her-all of this from a long shot, framed in the small window, as if to say that the new husband is both literally and metaphorically trapped. And the analogy, of course, is that Jeffries resists marriage the entire movie, unwilling to forego his high-flying lifestyle for any woman (even Grace Kelly!).

The film gradually heats up into its plot of mystery as Jeffries begins to suspect that the neighbor Thorwald has murdered his wife. Jeffries grows suspicious when he sees Thorwald leave his apartment three times in the middle of the night in a rainstorm, and he then shares his suspicions with Stella, Lisa, and a detective friend. And just as his cronies are pulled into the mystery and the "window shopping," so, too, are we. Hitchcock deftly unravels the story at such a perfect pace that we are stuck to our seats, desperately wanting to find out how it will all play out-both the murder mystery and the potential marriage between the seemingly mismatched pair.

Marriage, or the relationship of Lisa and Jeffries, is practically as significant to the film as the murdering neighbor (yes, he did do it). In fact, the characters would not discover what they do were it not for Lisa's desire to become more like the woman that she thinks Jeffries wants to marry-one who is adventurous and would go with him to Africa and not need the latest designer bag and nightgown to accompany her. And it is in the first real climactic moment of the film that Lisa bravely and genuinely suggests that she and Stella climb down to dig up what they think are Mrs. Thorwald's remains in the garden. And when they find nothing in the dirt it is Lisa who brazenly climbs the fire escape and slips into Thorwald's apartment and steals the evidence of the crime, only to be confronted by the killer himself. Throughout the film, but in that scene in particular, Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly are superb-we immediately identify with Jeffries, feel his pain, sense his aggravation, and live through his fear; and as Lisa becomes intrigued by the mystery across the garden, we begin to like her, too, eventually discovering her desire for excitement beyond the cuisine of Twenty-One.

In many respects, Rear Window encompasses Hitchcock's canon. With the possible exception of Psycho (1960), it is the film that is his greatest, showcasing his cinematic and novelistic brilliance. Both films actually function in a similar fashion, tying themselves very strongly to a protagonist with whom the audience can identify and from whose perspective nearly the entire film takes place (until Marion Crane in Psycho comes to her fate in the shower, of course). In shot after shot in Psycho, we watch from Marion's point of view, as she leaves Phoenix driving and ends up at the Bates Motel. Similarly, almost every shot of Rear Window either comes from within Jeffries' apartment, be it internal action or Jeffries' voyeurism. Just as we feel Marion's necessity to escape her situation, and we're rooting for her to do so, we urgently feel Jeffries' frustration: stuck in a wheelchair, hot, itchy, horribly unsure how his relationship is progressing, or how he wants it to. And then, when he marvelously fends off his homicidal neighbor, firing flashbulbs into his face and ours, we learn both the beauty and brawn of Hitchcock at his finest.

                                                              © THE FILM JOURNAL 2004