James Stewart is the man who sees too much. “Jeff” Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. And this is before the days of smart phones; he doesn’t even have a TV set! Fortunately — or not — Jeff can while away the hours watching reality unfold through the windows across the courtyard. There’s a spinster, “Miss Lonelyheart”; a composer working on a new tune; “Miss Torso”, a dancer. And then there’s Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), who disposes of his wife one night when he imagines no one is looking…
Hitchcock shoots this mystery story without ever leaving Jeff’s apartment, a technical feat that also accentuates the suspense: there’s no telling for the longest time whether he’s an eye-witness to murder or a bored insomniac with a macabre imagination. This masterpiece is a comment on voyeurism of course, but don’t overlook how the deft vignettes across the way all comment obliquely on the other quandary in Jeff’s life: whether to settle down with beautiful Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly, at her most captivating). It’s a marriage comedy, in other words, very dark, and very light.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 15-minute introduction by a local film scholar and be followed by an audience talkback.
Rear Window goes beyond pessimism; it is really a cruel film. Stewart fixes his glasses on his neighbours only to catch them in moments of failure, in ridiculous postures, when they appear grotesque or even hateful. The film’s construction is very like a musical composition: several themes are intermingled and are in perfect counterpoint to each other — marriage, suicide, degradation and death — and thare bathed in a refined eroticism… Rear Window is a film about indiscretion, about intimacy violated and taken by surprise at its most wretched moments; a film about the impossibility of happiness, about dirty linen that gets washed in the courtyard; a film about moral solitude, an extraordinary symphony of daily life and ruined dreams.
Francois Truffaut (1954)
Of all Hitchcock’s films, this is the one which most reveals the man.
Geoff Andrew, Time Out
The most densely allegorical of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces, moving from psychology to morality to formal concerns and finally to the theological. It is also Hitchcock’s most innovative film in terms of narrative technique.
Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
Alfred Hitchcock
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr
USA
1954
English
Indigenous & Community Access
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Credits
Screenwriter
John Michael Hayes
Cinematography
Robert Burks
Editor
George Tomasini
Original Music
Franz Waxman
Art Director
MacMillan Johnson, Hal Pereira
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
