Rear Window (Universal Legacy Series)
by Alfred Hitchcock
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Actor: Grace Kelly, James Stewart, Raymond Burr, Thelma Ritter, Wendell CoreyDirector: Alfred Hitchcock
Brand: STEWART,JAMES
Cinematographer: Robert Burks
Producer: Alfred Hitchcock
Editor: George Tomasini
Producer: James C. Katz
Writer: Cornell Woolrich
Writer: John Michael Hayes
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Dubbed)
Format: Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 112 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-10-07
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Reviews of Rear Window (Universal Legacy Series)
DVD Review: Warning: Package contains mutilated work of art!
Summary: 1 Stars
The image on this disc was cropped on the bottom, to convert the original 1.66 shape to the 1.78 shape of modern screens.
The still image from this movie that I see most often shows Grace Kelly facing the camera and reclining on the daybed in the foreground, with Stewart upstage in the wheelchair. On this disc, the portion of her figure closest to the lower edge of the image is cropped away. You can see that shot 71 minutes into the movie.
To me it seems that about every other shot in the movie is badly composed, and that's because the image was cropped along the bottom. For instance, Thelma Ritter's hands keep dropping below the lower edge of the screen while she's making the bed. Once you become conscious of this, it really spoils the movie.
Is mutilating old movies to fit modern 16:9 screens just a fad? Will there come a time when we can get genuine (not mutilated) copies of these terrific movies?
I really wish everyone who notices this on any movie would give the movie the lowest possible rating in online reviews. The people who make the DVDs might stop cropping movies this way if enough people complain loudly. Public cmplaint successfully brought about a re-release of the first season of Route 66, after the first release was cropped on top and bottom.
Come on, gang! Tell them we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more!
DVD Review: Not my favorite because...
Summary: 3 Stars
I LOVE Hitchcock. But perhaps I watched this movie with the wrong expectation. What I expected was a nail-biter. The truth is I only felt nervous/fearful in the last 15 minutes of the movie. It felt long, and the climax was over too quickly. Not a satisfying payoff to all the waiting.
It is very interesting as a drama. (Fantastic for watching human behavior and for the little storylines of the neighbors.) As a suspense film, though, not scary enough.
DVD Review: "Rear Window," Fah!
Summary: 3 Stars
Just saw the glorious "North by Northwest" on the big screen at a local rep house, and afterward, browsing online critical notices ("Top Ten Films of the '50s," etc.), I was startled to note that "Rear Window" is just as often, if not more often, spoken of as a Great Hitchcock Movie.
So this brief review is written just to vent my appalled outrage at the VERY DUMB notion that "Rear Window" could ever remotely deserve mention in the same breath with "NXNW"!
"Rear Window" is a stagy, stodgy, dated piece of '50s mass entertainment. (The villain is Raymond Burr, for god's sake!) It's always struck me as one of those big-box-office-targeted popcorn movies that a serious director makes to keep his Hollywood hitmaker cred--like, say, Warren Beatty's "Heaven Can Wait" or Scorsese's Howard Hughes bio-pic.
Don't get me wrong--"Rear Window" is not a bad film at all. It's cleverly conceived and written in a traditional well-made play sort of way. (The hero, stuck in a little bachelor apartment with a broken leg, spies a possible murder out his back window and has to catch the bad guy without ever leaving his room.) It's carefully plotted to dole out the suspense spoonful by spoonful, and has the requisite colorful minor characters, mostly quirky neighbors observed from afar through Jimmy Stewart's nosy binoculars.
But it's among Hitchcock's least personally-stamped films. Though there are some nice touches--it impudently cocks an eyebrow at film's inherent voyeurism--more than any other movie of Hitchcock's great mature period, it seems a filmed version of somebody else's work. Like a Broadway play brought to the screen, say, though I know it wasn't that. (The screenplay was based on an extant short story.)
Jimmy Stewart is a bit miscast as a hard-boiled war-and-disaster photographer; trying to play hard-bitten, he's wooden. And maybe it's me, but the opposites-attract, mildly troubled romance with society-girl-to-the-max Grace Kelly left me yawning, and even rolling my eyes at times. (Yes, she sure is purty.)
Now, contrast that with "NXNW"'s brilliant pan-American mise-en-scene, with its inspired scene-making (the classic crop-duster sequence, Eva Marie Saint's suavely brazen seduction of Cary Grant aboard the 20th Century Ltd., the finale on--literally--Mt. Rushmore), and consider how all that visual/conceptual inventiveness so resonantly inscribes the film's suspenseful parable (of embattled personal integrity in the treacherous Cold War U.S.) right across an iconic American landscape.
And contrast Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint (hot) with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly (chilly)...
...And one can't escape the feeling that comparing "Rear Window" with a really great piece of Hitchcockian filmmaking like "NXNW," let alone "Vertigo" or "Psycho," does NOT work to "Rear Window"'s advantage. It just shows up "Rear Window" as the perfectly okay but definitely second-tier Hitchcock it is.
JMHO!
DVD Review: Hitchcock thriller
Summary: 3 Stars
Hitchcock films usually string the viewer along and slowly builds up the tension and suspense until a climactic finish. Rear Window is no exception and from a slow start we are gradually propelled along with the main character towards a confrontation with the man he's slowly realised has committed a murder.
The added ingredient is that he's wheelchair bound following an accident, and is unable to flee when events conspire to bring the two together.
The story is basic enough, and we get to see the neighbours of the courtyard which comprises the entire world of this film - with the sole exception of a glimpse of the outside strret through a narrow alleyway. Most of the neighbours we hardly meet close up, but they all have their own personalities and lives, and we only really see them through the eyes of the wheelbound voyeur.
James Stewart and Grace Kelley are the headline stars here, Stewart the wheelbound photographer and Kelley his glamourous girlfriend, but I couldn't help feeling they were mismatched and things didn't exactly gel between them, either on screen (at least to my eyes) or as characters. Also it was a little ponderous at times in getting to the point, and I felt my attention wandering on occasions while watching it. I was also a little let down at the climax when Raymond Burr's character finally confronted Stewart. It was certainly unrealistic and was like opening a long promised box of chocolates to find they had been crushed en route.
But as a suspense thriller worth seeing once.
DVD Review: Great movie, great package
Summary: 5 Stars
Rear Window comes in a nice jewel case that resembles the hardcover jacket of a book, it closes and opens with a click and looks good.
If you're searching for Rear Window to purchase, then you know why you're doing that--there is a lot to this movie. In class we watched and analyzed nearly every shot in the film. The point of the movie itself is to explore the very nature of the cinema-going experience. The viewer is essentially a voyeur into the lives of the characters onscreen exactly as James Stewart's L.B. Jeffries is a voyeur into the private lives of his neighbors.
Awesome!
HC
Description of Rear Window (Universal Legacy Series)
One of Alfred Hitchcock's most suspenseful screen achievements, Rear Window, is now available in a new 2-disc Special Edition DVD! When a professional photographer (James Stewart) suspects his neighbor of murdering his nagging wife, he enlists his socialite girlfriend (Grace Kelly) to help investigate the suspicious chain of events.Honored in AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movies for excellence in film, Rear Window has also been hailed as "one of Alfred Hitchcock's most stylish thrillers" (Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide). With in-depth bonus features and a digitally remastered picture, this set showcases a cinematic masterpiece that continues to entertain audiences around the world.
Like the Greenwich Village courtyard view from its titular portal, Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window is both confined and multileveled: both its story and visual perspective are dictated by its protagonist's imprisonment in his apartment, convalescing in a wheelchair, from which both he and the audience observe the lives of his neighbors. Cheerful voyeurism, as well as the behavior glimpsed among the various tenants, affords a droll comic atmosphere that gradually darkens when he sees clues to what may be a murder.
Photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart) is, in fact, a voyeur by trade, a professional photographer sidelined by an accident while on assignment. His immersion in the human drama (and comedy) visible from his window is a by-product of boredom, underlined by the disapproval of his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), and a wisecracking visiting nurse (Thelma Ritter). Yet when the invalid wife of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) disappears, Jeff enlists the two women to help him to determine whether she's really left town, as Thorwald insists, or been murdered.
Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto convincingly argues that the crime at the center of this mystery is the MacGuffin--a mere pretext--in a film that's more interested in the implications of Jeff's sentinel perspective. We actually learn more about the lives of the other neighbors (given generic names by Jeff, even as he's drawn into their lives) he, and we, watch undetected than we do the putative murderer and his victim. Jeff's evident fear of intimacy and commitment with the elegant, adoring Lisa provides the other vital thread to the script, one woven not only into the couple's own relationship, but reflected and even commented upon through the various neighbors' lives.
At minimum, Hitchcock's skill at making us accomplices to Jeff's spying, coupled with an ingenious escalation of suspense as the teasingly vague evidence coalesces into ominous proof, deliver a superb thriller spiked with droll humor, right up to its nail-biting, nightmarish climax. At deeper levels, however, Rear Window plumbs issues of moral responsibility and emotional honesty, while offering further proof (were any needed) of the director's brilliance as a visual storyteller. --Sam Sutherland
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