Rear Window

Hitchcock’s utterly engrossing thriller puts us a sweltering apartment with Stewart, a daredevil photojournalist stuck in a wheelchair nursing a broken leg. We share in his guilty pleasure as he watches his neighbors through a telephoto lens, but what starts as a pastime quickly turns to obsession as we begin to suspect one of the neighbors of murder.

Soon, we’re trapped in the apartment with Stewart, as his beautiful girlfriend, played by Grace Kelly, finds herself in mortal danger in the neighbor’s apartment and all we can do is watch, because Stewart, like us, is just an audience, at least until the murder looks out his window, and out of the movie, and sees us.

Rear Window is a great example of a master director at the top of his game. Director Alfred Hitchcock takes a dynamite premise and exploits it to its full potential, delivering both a taunt thriller and a subtle expose of our voyeuristic society.

Stewart and Kelly seem to ooze charm and effortlessly pull you into the story, and Thelma Ritter, who plays Stewart’s nurse, gets some of the script’s best lines. The result is a movie that you can keep coming back to, time and again.

For his part Hitchcock tells the story flawlessly. While a lesser director would have spelled everything out, Hitch puts us in the room with Stewart and lets us come to our own conclusions as the story progresses.