Rear Window

Rating: 5+/5

I watched Rear Window tonight. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen it, but I always feel as if I can never watch it enough.

Rear Window is the perfect thriller. It’s deserving of the cliched phrase, “they don’t make them like that anymore”. It’s true, because outside of a movie being a period piece, the key elements that make the suspense in Rear Window so palpable is the absence of technology. For a modern day movie that would try to replicate the circumstances in Rear Window, and many movies have tried, there always has to be some forced scenario where someone’s cell phone has died, is out of range, or has been damaged in order to make the characters feel like they’re truly in danger and without the ability to call for help. Because these obstacles have to be so deliberately placed, you as the audience don’t feel the tension and fear in your chest as you do so effortlessly in Rear Window. In Hitchcock’s masterpiece, due to the time in which it was made, when Jimmy Stewart’s Jeff looks helplessly across the street upon Grace Kelly’s Lisa, you feel his desperation and frantic fear, as he doesn’t know what to do to warn her and hopefully save her in time. He has no choice but to look on, nothing to do but watch and hope she won’t be harmed. There’s no thought that crosses your mind on how he could contact her, because you know there’s nothing he can do.

Rear Window is the rare instance where it gets better every time I watch it. I catch things I hadn’t noticed before and I appreciate more and more of it with every viewing. In it, Grace Kelly is phenomenal, the epitome of a movie star. Delivering without question one of the best performances, not just of the Classic Hollywood era, but of all time.

Rear Window, though not labeled as horror, but more as suspense, brings more fear with its use of shadow than most direct horror movies do with blood and gore. It’s the ability to not fully see what lurks in the dark that makes even the most simple of scenes be incredibly effective.

I could gush for hours about Rear Window. To repeat myself a bit, it is truly a shame they can’t make movies with a story like this anymore and have it produce the same results. Of course there are wonderful thrillers that have been released in the cell-phone era, but there’s a remarkable quality to Rear Window that cannot be replicated and makes this movie an unimpeachable classic.