Rear Window (Collector's Edition)
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Benny Bartlett, Frank Cady, Raymond Burr, Ross Bagdasarian, Sara BernerBrand: UNI DIST CORP. (MCA)
Primary Contributor: Grace Kelly
Primary Contributor: Stewart, James
DVD: 2 Layers, Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Collector's Edition, Color, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.66:1
Running Time: 115 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-03-06
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Universal Studios Home Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Rear Window (Collector's Edition)
Movie Review: Hitchcock thriller
Summary: 3 Stars
Hitchcock films usually string the viewer along and slowly builds up the tension and suspense until a climactic finish. Rear Window is no exception and from a slow start we are gradually propelled along with the main character towards a confrontation with the man he's slowly realised has committed a murder.
The added ingredient is that he's wheelchair bound following an accident, and is unable to flee when events conspire to bring the two together.
The story is basic enough, and we get to see the neighbours of the courtyard which comprises the entire world of this film - with the sole exception of a glimpse of the outside strret through a narrow alleyway. Most of the neighbours we hardly meet close up, but they all have their own personalities and lives, and we only really see them through the eyes of the wheelbound voyeur.
James Stewart and Grace Kelley are the headline stars here, Stewart the wheelbound photographer and Kelley his glamourous girlfriend, but I couldn't help feeling they were mismatched and things didn't exactly gel between them, either on screen (at least to my eyes) or as characters. Also it was a little ponderous at times in getting to the point, and I felt my attention wandering on occasions while watching it. I was also a little let down at the climax when Raymond Burr's character finally confronted Stewart. It was certainly unrealistic and was like opening a long promised box of chocolates to find they had been crushed en route.
But as a suspense thriller worth seeing once.
Summary of Rear Window (Collector's Edition)
None of Hitchcock's films has ever given a clearer view of his genius for suspense than Rear Window. When professional photographer J.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart) is confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg, he becomes obsessed with watching the private dramas of his neighbors play out across the courtyard. When he suspects a salesman may have murdered his nagging wife, Jeffries enlists the help of his glamorous socialite girlfriend (Grace Kelly) to investigate the highly suspicious chain of events. Events that ultimately lead to one of the most memorable and gripping endings in all of film history.Like the Greenwich Village courtyard view from its titular portal, Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window is both confined and multileveled: both its story and visual perspective are dictated by its protagonist's imprisonment in his apartment, convalescing in a wheelchair, from which both he and the audience observe the lives of his neighbors. Cheerful voyeurism, as well as the behavior glimpsed among the various tenants, affords a droll comic atmosphere that gradually darkens when he sees clues to what may be a murder.
Photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart) is, in fact, a voyeur by trade, a professional photographer sidelined by an accident while on assignment. His immersion in the human drama (and comedy) visible from his window is a by-product of boredom, underlined by the disapproval of his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), and a wisecracking visiting nurse (Thelma Ritter). Yet when the invalid wife of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) disappears, Jeff enlists the two women to help him to determine whether she's really left town, as Thorwald insists, or been murdered.
Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto convincingly argues that the crime at the center of this mystery is the MacGuffin--a mere pretext--in a film that's more interested in the implications of Jeff's sentinel perspective. We actually learn more about the lives of the other neighbors (given generic names by Jeff, even as he's drawn into their lives) he, and we, watch undetected than we do the putative murderer and his victim. Jeff's evident fear of intimacy and commitment with the elegant, adoring Lisa provides the other vital thread to the script, one woven not only into the couple's own relationship, but reflected and even commented upon through the various neighbors' lives.
At minimum, Hitchcock's skill at making us accomplices to Jeff's spying, coupled with an ingenious escalation of suspense as the teasingly vague evidence coalesces into ominous proof, deliver a superb thriller spiked with droll humor, right up to its nail-biting, nightmarish climax. At deeper levels, however, Rear Window plumbs issues of moral responsibility and emotional honesty, while offering further proof (were any needed) of the director's brilliance as a visual storyteller. --Sam Sutherland
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