Classic Movie Review From My Collection: Rear Window

I never fully realized before, but only just accepted it on face value, that Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window is one hell of a movie. The two or three times I’d seen it previously I guess I sort of accepted its status as a classic great movie. This time I absorbed it fully and saw in it how its technical prowess supports a great story and ironic commentary on both marriage and on watching other people’s lives unfold on a screen from a darkened movie house.

Voyeurism as a theme runs throughout much of Hitchcock’s work, of course, but Rear Window is the one time he’s thumbing his nose at the audience for being so interested in the lives of others. The image that plays behind the opening titles is of the shades going upon on L.B. Jeffries’ windows onto the back courtyard, like the curtain rising on his personal theatrical stage or movie screen. Jeffries (James Stewart) spends the next 100 minutes or so observing his neighbors or thinking about their actions. But what begins as casual observing becomes obsessive watching and a paranoia about possible dirty deeds committed by Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) across the way. In the end Jeffries ceases to be a passive audience member and becomes what no member of a movie audience can be: an actor in the real life (to him) drama playing out.

Hitchcock Movie Review

There is a speech delivered by Helen Mirren in Hitchcock that begins bluntly and forcefully, before becoming one of those acting moments that gets played over and over again at awards shows. It’s a moment of performance that can so quickly and easily become overwrought, but then you realize that Mirren is an actress of incredible skill, subtlety, and professionalism that she won’t let her performance overshadow her character. She plays Alma Reville, the great director Alfred Hitchcock’s long-suffering wife and behind-the-scenes collaborator. She holds the film together and although Hitchcock is ostensibly concerned with the making of Psycho, that’s really just a backdrop for the way their marriage functioned and occasionally faltered.

Gus Van Sant's Psycho Movie Review: If It Ain't Broken, Don't Fix It

First published in The Connecticut College Voice on 11 December 1998.

Republished here unaltered.

As things generally go, you may want to avoid those rare films which aren’t screened for critics. They are usually extraordinarily bad and the filmmakers would rather have a chance at opening weekend box office and not kill those chances with bad reviews on opening day. But the case for Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, a shot-for-shot re-creation of the original is not the same. Hitchcock did not screen his 1960 masterpiece for critics and Van Sant does the same as a way to take one more step toward his carbon copy.

I watched the original twice in the week preceding my viewing of the new version so that I could get a feel for the movement of the camera and take a handle on the dialogue. So little is changed in Van Sant’s that what is changed is hardly worth mentioning; even the license plate on Marion’s car is the same.