Rear Window (1954) Appreciation Thread

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by Timeless Classics, May 23, 2020.

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  1. longdist01

    longdist01 Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
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  2. Solaris

    Solaris a bullet in flight

    Location:
    New Orleans, LA
    A few years ago I showed this to a friend who'd never seen it and it was such a great experience watching her get absorbed by it. A great film.
     
  3. mark renard

    mark renard Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    Agreed. My mother took us to see this in a theater when I was a kid in the early 80s. It made a huge impression on me and it made me a fan of Hitchcock at a young age.
     
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  4. Timeless Classics

    Timeless Classics Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    I love how Hitchock used the ring scene with Lisa in Thorwald's apartment, my favorite scene in the entire film, as a double entendre. Hitchock seemed to keep the questions of romance between Jeff and Lisa separate from thriller storyline, but kept giving clues that they were being interwoven together. How in the previous post in this thread about the strangling of the dog, it shows frame by frame that Jeff and Lisa are getting closer and closer. Their contrasting lifestyles and what they represent are a major obstacle in the fulfilment of their romance, and the murder mystery both distracts and unites them. Lisa keeps telling Jeff she wants to get married, and Jeff keeps refusing to entertain the subject due to their differing lifestyles. Hitchcock further alludes to the question of whether marriage will be able to settle those differences after all—a major example is the following scene, in which Lisa not only reveals her discovery of Mrs Thorwald’s ring, but also expresses a desire for Jeff to ‘put a ring on it’ as well.... A masterful play by Hitchock of this iconic picture of Lisa showing the ring and she points and wiggles her finger - simultaneously showing us the evidence that they need to get Thorwald but also a play on theme of Lisa & Jeff. Jeff not only sees the evidence, but he gets a picture and firsthand visceral visual of what Lisa would look like with a wedding ring on.

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    Last edited: May 30, 2020
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  5. JamieC

    JamieC Senior Member

    Location:
    Detroit Mi USA
    I absolutely cannot watch Vertigo. The effects literally make me sick. First saw it in the theater and had to leave. Small screen is no better. I must be a small minority. I also cannot handle FMV rides either.
     
  6. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    Not a movie to watch if you suffer vertigo.
     
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  7. JamieC

    JamieC Senior Member

    Location:
    Detroit Mi USA
    All I really remember from my first time is "I look up, I look down. I look up, I look down. I look...." Arg!
     
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  8. Timeless Classics

    Timeless Classics Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    I was thinking a lot about the way Hitchock used Jeff's character as a photographer. Early on we see all of his pictures he took and captured on his wall. And he uses his photojournalist profession as an escape from relational/marriage commitment with Lisa. He is dying to get back to work, as evidenced by the phone conversation with his boss on another photo job he is missing and Jeff wants to still take it despite being wheelchair bound. All of this is really interesting - Jeff is so absorbed in his work, but we never see him take a photo in the entire film. What does all this mean? Any thoughts?

    This was really bugging me and tried to see what others have felt. Here is one response: "For Hitchcock’s purposes, a photographer is above all someone who looks. It is their socially accepted voyeurism that is significant, not their images. Voyeurism requires a safe distance, a vantage point for the observer beyond the reach of the observed (much like a movie audience, watching but not accountable). In Rear Window, the photographer is cut off not just by the lens of his camera, or by the glass window of his apartment, or indeed by the abyss of the courtyard across which he stares. It is his professionalized looking, with its fantasy of objectivity, that cuts him off. It demands his separation from the world. Despite witnessing what he believes is a murderer covering his traces, he feels no urge to get it on film. Rather, he uses his camera’s long lens as a telescope to watch, swapping it for binoculars when things get really intense.

    The photographer’s curiosity is merely Hitchcock’s means to a thoroughly cinematic end. If proof were needed that photography was not really Hitchcock’s subject, consider the bits of photographic activity that we see in Rear Window. They are odd, to say the least. In the opening pan we glimpse a framed photograph, taken from the middle of a racetrack, of two cars crashing. A tire is hurtling toward the camera, presumably destined to hospitalize the photographer. A real photograph of the crash would have been impossible to make from this vantage, and the image is clearly a montage. We then see a very old crushed camera (too old to have been used by a photojournalist even in 1954), followed by an image of Jeffries’s leg in a cast. The sequence is a quick expository device and its realism is not important. Later in the film Jeffries notices that plants in the courtyard flowerbed have grown shorter, leading him to presume a body has been buried there. He consults a box of “before” and “after” transparencies he has taken of the courtyard. No account is given of why he might have made such banal photos. Then, in the film’s denouement, the murderer spots the watching photographer and comes over to his apartment to confront him. As he enters, Jeffries slows his approach by firing flashbulbs at him repeatedly in the dark. The strobes blind the killer temporarily, deferring the moment of confrontation—the few seconds it should take him to cross the room are distended to a tense minute or so. All these instances are unrealistic and even ludicrous. It is as if Hitchcock is interested in everything about the photographer apart from the photography."

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    Very interesting about what this says about Jeff's character. You'd think being a photojournalist, he would want to capture what is going on in Thorwald's apartment with photo evidence. But we never actually see him take a picture. Any thoughts?


    Re-viewing Rear Window - David Campany
     
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  9. Steve Litos

    Steve Litos Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago IL
    Just researching the "missing years" when the film was pulled from circulation.

    Rear Window had a general re-release in 1962.

    The last theater to play it (that I could find) was the Esquire in Detroit 8-2-1964.

    Then it was shown on tv in a few markets in the fall of 1966 and the spring of 1967.

    The latest I could find was Honolulu on 4-16-1967.

    Then it was gone until 1983!
     
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  10. misterdecibel

    misterdecibel Bulbous Also Tapered

    Some photojournalists were still using large folding cameras such as the Speed Graphic in the early 1950s.

    [​IMG]
     
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  11. MattyDC

    MattyDC Forum Resident

    Location:
    The DMV
    What a wonderful, wonderful thread. Thanks to the OP for creating it.

    I have such fond memories of this film. My family would have "Friday Night Movies" when I was a boy, when my dad would come home from work with a VHS tape and we'd get to enjoy a rare package of Oreos or some such. This was one of the films we watched - and it really stuck out for me. (Then again, on another Friday my mother made us watch "The Good Earth", so it wasn't exactly a homerun every time). Some 35 years later, I recently showed this to my own children. They were "terrified", in the words of my then-thirteen year old son.

    I think my favorite Hitch film is NBNW, followed by Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, and Dial M for Murder. In reading this thread and considering RW among the other Hitchcock movies that I've mentioned, I'm utterly struck by how the entire movie takes place in this one scene. Unbelievable film making.

    And Grace Kelly is absolutely stunning.
     
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  12. SamS

    SamS Forum Legend

    Location:
    Texas
    Vertigo is my all time #1, but Rear Window is a solid #2. Grace Kelly, my goodness. Can just take your breath away.
     
  13. Armjim

    Armjim Music is indeed a gift from Heaven

    Location:
    San Antonio, TX
    I can't add anything other than to acknowledge Rear Window is one of THE greats.
     
  14. arley

    arley Forum Resident

    I agree with all the fine things said about this movie, but there is one little detail that bugs me. When Jeff is blinding the bad guy with repeated flash bulbs, he changes the bulbs quickly by removing the spent bulbs with his fingers. There's NO WAY you could do that. When a flash bulb goes off, the surface of the bulb is molten glass--you can't just grab it like that.

    Another niggling detail in North by Northwest--after Cary Grant is drugged by the bad guys, he attempts to drive along a mountain road. One of the rear wheels goes off the edge. He guns the engine and somehow the other rear wheel gets the car back on the road. Again, no way. The free wheel would continue to spin until the cows come home. Limited-slip differentials didn't exist then.
     
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  15. misterdecibel

    misterdecibel Bulbous Also Tapered

    There's an "eject" button on those old flash units. The spent bulbs pop out, you only have to handle the fresh ones when you pop them in. What he was doing in that scene was no different from how the flash would be used for news-gathering at an event.

    If photographers had to wait 'til the bulb was cool enough to handle before they could take another photo, probably half of all the Pulitzer prize winning photos from 1935-1960 wouldn't exist.
     
    Last edited: Apr 14, 2021
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  16. arley

    arley Forum Resident

    I stand corrected. I misremembered the scene; looking at the YT clip I see that he only handled the fresh ones.
     
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  17. Spencer R

    Spencer R Forum Resident

    Location:
    Oxford, MS
    I’d say Rear Window and North by Northwest are the two greatest American films ever made.
     
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  18. John Moschella

    John Moschella Senior Member

    Location:
    Christiansburg, VA
    I love all the Rear Window short reviews. Kind of goes this this:

    Rear Window is this, Rear Window is that, ... Grace Kelly was stunning.

    That about sums it up. The wardrobe is intense. This one is my favorite Hitch.
     
  19. jwoverho

    jwoverho Licensed Drug Dealer

    Location:
    Mobile, AL USA
    While VERTIGO might be the more impressive film, REAR WINDOW is a much lighter experience, and one which rewards the viewer by the end. VERTIGO is too bleak for me after all these years. The leads in REAR WINDOW are just more likable than the obsessive, dysfunctional ones of VERTIGO.

    One of Hitchcock’s finest.
     
  20. Spitfire

    Spitfire Senior Member

    Location:
    Pacific Northwest
    Just watched this today and noticed for the first time that Rear Window basically ends where Vertigo begins with Jimmy Stewart hanging from a building.
     
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