Hitch #42 - Rear Window (1954)

'A preview of coming attractions'

Oddly I haven’t rated Rear Window before, although I have watched it many times over the years, but maybe not for a few years, and I clearly forgot to rate it when I did. Hazel has us watching it in 2005, so… I guess it might be twenty years since last time. But, like Dial M for Murder it’s a film I know very well. I remember watching a VHS recording of it with my sister quite a lot.

Why haven’t I watched it more recently? Did I think I didn’t like it that much? Clearly that was wrong, although I did get a feeling that I didn’t want to like it as much as I did, but by the end it was impossible not to have been sucked into it all. The tension of Stella and Lisa going to dig up the garden, and Lisa breaking into Thorvald’s flat… and getting caught! And that coupled with poor Miss Lonelyhearts contemplating suicide, all of this had me on the edge of my seat (even though I knew how it all panned out).

I liked this more that I thought I would, and maybe even more than I hoped I would. Grace Kelly was lovely, and great, and James Stewart was fine (although I couldn’t get why either of them thought they were compatible) - but Thelma Ritter was the best of all, such sass, delivered to perfection:

Jeff: Those two yellow zinnias at the end, they're shorter now. Now since when do flowers grow shorter over the course of two weeks? Something's buried there.

Lisa: Mrs. Thorwald!

Stella: You haven't spent much time around cemeteries, have you? Mr. Thorwald could hardly bury his wife's body in plot of ground about one foot square. Unless he put her in standing on end, in which case he wouldn't need the knives and saw.

Lisa: What's he doing? Cleaning house?

Jeff: He's washing and scrubbing down the bathroom walls.

Stella: Must've splattered a lot.

Stella: Come on, that's what were all thinkin'. He killed her in there, now he has to clean up those stains before he leaves.

Lisa: Stella... your choice of words!

Stella: Nobody ever invented a polite word for a killin' yet.

Jeff: I just can't figure it. He went out several times last night in the rain carrying his sample case.

Stella: Well, he's a salesman, isn't he?

Jeff: Well, what would he be selling at three o'clock in the morning?

Stella: Flashlights. Luminous dials for watches. House numbers that light up.

Stella: We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes sir. How's that for a bit of homespun philosophy?

L.B. Jefferies: Reader's Digest, April 1939.

Stella: Well, I only quote from the best.

Rear Window

And a couple of sweet throwaways at the end… Miss Torso’s boyfriend coming home and not being anything like the wolves she’d been fighting off; and Miss Lonelyhearts, having been saved by the song, is now spending time with the songwriter…

• Source: Download
• Rating: 8/10
• Hitchcock Zone: Rear Window