Review of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window

I was 15 when I first saw Rear Window, and I loved it. Of course, my motives were not entirely pure, at least not purely cinematic. I was in love with Grace Kelly; Jimmy Stewart's behavior towards her in the film was utterly incomprehensible to me. He seemed like an idiot for putting her off, especially since she so obviously wanted him.

There were other reasons. It was a wonderful suspense film, absolutely riveting, and funny to boot and even at that time I knew that I was attracted by more than the murder mystery. The film represents a fascinating combination of intimacy and non-intimacy. People who are usually completely isolated from one another are bound together in a community of shared experience by an external event, a heat wave, though they are unaware of it. They are united only through the voyeurism of Stewart, who enjoys watching them in their separate apartments through the rear window of his and living vicariously through them. The community exists in his mind; we see it through his eyes. I sensed and responded to his fantasy, just as I sensed the guilty pleasure of my identification with his Peeping Tom-ism.

Later, I came to realize that the viewer's sense of being implicated was a deliberate intention on Hitchcock's part, and that it involved more than just a little innocently prurient voyeurism. (Though in the pre-sexual revolution 1950s, “Miss Torso's” exposing her naked back as she drops her halter was a lot more daring, and titillating, than it would be to today's nudity-jaded audience.) There seemed to me to be a deep connection between what Jefferies, the Stewart character, sees through his window and his inner life. But that thought immediately raises the question of the legitimacy of psychoanalyzing a film like this. Isn't that bringing too heavy guns to bear on such light entertainment, the comedy-drama that Hitchcock was so good at? Hitchcock is probably the most over-interpreted of English-language directors, subjected in particular to the t