VOD film review: Rear Window
Review Overview
Voyeuristic camera
10Suspicious sounds
10David Farnor | On 24, Feb 2017
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Raymond Burr
Certificate: PG
“If it’s a good movie,” Alfred Hitchcock once said, “the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what’s going on.” It’s something that he already seemed to understand and appreciate at the tender age of 29, when he made his groundbreaking film Blackmail. The 1929 thriller was released in two versions, as a silent movie and also as a movie with sound.
The similarity between the sound and silent version is proof of the Brit’s film-making mettle: a director who liked to show rather than tell, he wasn’t afraid to break new ground to tell a story effectively, even if it meant no sound whatsoever. The silent version is better – sleeker, meaner and faster – but that only underscores how much Hitch valued the power silence (and sound) could have upon an audience. A key scene in that film sees a nosy neighbour talk about a murder, saying the word knife over and over again in different sentences – and every time she says it, the word gets louder, clearer and more dramatic.
That knack for subjective soundtracks, using every tool on hand to manipulate a viewer’s perspective, only got better as the director’s career went on. By the time he reached 1954, when Rear Window was nominated for four Oscars, the shock wasn’t that he didn’t win Best Director, but that the movie didn’t win its nomination for Best Sound.
The movie, of course, follows L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart), a wheelchair-bound photographer, who passes the time by turning his camera on his neighbours and starts spying on the people next door. He’s visited by a friend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), to whom he slowly reveals his dramatic theory: that his neighbour, Lars Thorwald, has killed his wife.
It’s a devilishly brilliant premise, preying on its audience’s voyeuristic tendencies to build tension. By the time the climax happens, Grace Kelly is rooting through Lars’ apartment, only for him to return unexpectedly – a scenario so iconic and so immediately gripping that it’s been parodied, or copied, in everything from The Simpsons to Nickelodeon’s Sister Sister.
The film delights in playing with our sympathies and speculation, casting Raymond Burr (a man so charismatically noble that he would go on to play Perry Mason) in the role of the possible murderer, while keeping us firmly on Stewart’s side of the courtyard, as he looks at Lisa, helplessly, and whispers to her to “get out”, even though she can’t hear him – exactly what everyone in the audience is doing behind Hitch’s own snooping lens. Within its taut runtime, the film finds room for a blossoming romance between Kelly and Stewart, and the resulting comedy highlights just how tight Hitch’s grasp of shifting tones was.
That’s where Rear Window really dazzles. The carefully placed camera, cheekily withholding the crucial story beats we need, and the believable depiction of day-to-day apartment block life are all up on the screen to admire. The sound design, though, is as subtle and sharp as Blackmail’s knife.
The murder we’re convinced we’ve seen is, crucially, kept completely out of sight, taking place behind Lars’ lowered blinds. And so we must rely on our ears, not our eyes – and Hitch keeps our hearing firmly restricted to Jeff’s apartment. We only hear what he can, never letting us get outside of his suspicious mindset. Throughout, any music we get is diegetic (originating from within the movie), overheard by Jeff from the musician who conveniently lives next door. The result is a fiendishly simple thriller presented with quiet complexity – a masterclass in technical storytelling, from a director whose skill has rarely been distilled into such an elegantly stripped-down package. A gripping, riveting ride that will have you keeping a close eye (and ear) on your neighbours for years to come.