Rear Window

“You don’t know the meaning of the word neighbor. Neighbors like each other, speak to each other, care if anybody lives or dies, but none of you do.” So cries a woman to all the courtyard neighbors when her over-curious dog is found dead, having been eliminated by the ominous Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window based on a Cornell Woolrich story and considered by many critics to be one of the greatest films ever made. A study of modern American disconnectedness as well as a chilling suspense film, Rear Window stars James Stewart as photographer L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies whose temporary wheelchair-bound status has left him with plenty of time to stare out his window and study the behaviors and experiences of his Greenwich Village neighbors like a zoologist studying a habitat where nobody closes their blinds (the elaborate set was a replica of an actual block on Christopher Street and custom built at Paramount studios). His observations of Thorwald’s comings and goings gradually lead Jeff to deduce that the salesman has killed his invalid wife and chopped up her body (“Just how would you start to cut up a human body?”), a theory soon accepted by his high society girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and visiting nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter) but all but dismissed by his police officer friend Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey). As would be expected, Hitchcock here created some of the cinema’s most novel (and now iconic) suspense sequences, such as Lisa’s slipping the note under Thorwald’s apartment door and later breaking in, while infusing occasional humor, particularly in the one-liners delivered by the uniquely talented Ritter. Aside from Waxman’s music to accompany the opening credits, the film has no musical score, relying instead on diegetic music from nearby apartments, a natural fit for a film in which the setting and point of view (Jeff’s apartment) are unchanged for the full two-hour duration.