Rear Window Review

 Rear Window

    The movie I selected to watch for this blog post was Rear Window (1954) directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The reason this movie intrigued me more than the others was because I have not seen a lot of Hitchcock's films despite his reputation within Hollywood, and I am glad that I chose it. I really liked the decision to have it set essentially in one room, with characters coming and going. Using locations like Thorwald's apartment but only from the outside looking in was such a unique choice that could not have been easy to pull off, which I heavily admire. Modern mystery and suspense movies tend to, in my opinion, not leave things up to interpretation. I recently saw Longlegs (2024) directed by Oz Perkins, which was a mystery movie but after the characters found out what the solution was, it just explained all of it through dialogue. In this movie, I really liked how they left things up to interpretation. At a certain point I was pretty sure Jefferies was going crazy from watching all these people for all this time, and that Thorwald was innocent. Leaving aspects up to interpretation is something that I think really shined in the Golden Age, modern movies tend to spoon feed too much.

   
One aspect I really liked was the lighting. I liked how the lighting was a tool to convey suspense both in the film to the characters and outside of the film to the audience. The characters would hide in the darkness when they thought people were looking at them which made for some cool shots. My favorite was when Thorwald confronted Jeff and both of them were stood in the darkness, neither one of them moving. The camera flashes as Jeff was approached were cool but I felt aged pretty poorly, plus Thorwald being stopped in his tracks by a camera flash was pretty dumb. The effects of the sequence that followed were also pretty goofy, everyone running out of their homes at 2x speed was funny and Jeff falling looked like a cartoon. Those are nitpicks that are going to be present in all films of this era so I wouldn't consider them actual complaints.

    

I think this film was influenced by the red scare and the US government's actions around that time. The idea of your neighbor spying on you seemed like an allegory for people that were being outed as communists by their friends and coworkers. Maybe it was supportive of those actions since it was told from the perspective of the spy, but either way I was getting those vibes. When people were living in fear that the government is monitoring their actions, a movie about someone being caught murdering his wife because someone was watching him all the time does not seem coincidental.

    All in all, this was a great movie and I am glad to have watched it.