Overrated Hitchcock?
Grace Kelly is ridiculously stunning. James Stewart is awesome. The coziness of the apartment, the concept of peeping into various neighbours’ homes… all great.
Where Rear Window falls down for me is in the suspense and story departments. For most of the film we might be seeing the aftermath of a murder, but we haven’t met the characters so I struggle to care.
In Rope, the tension is excruciating. The two psychos kill a young man at the very start, store his body in a chest, then invite his friends and family around to a party around his corpse. It’s sick and twisted, and the tension becomes unbearable as Rupert (Stewart again) gradually starts to work out what’s going on. We’re right in the thick of it, and worried about what will hapoen to Stewart when he finds out.
Watching a few clues play out from a distance to characters we never meet and only glimpse from afar, and which hardly point to a murder at all, just doesn’t grab me.
The only legit tense moment was near the end when Kelly snuck into the apartment, but even that was slightly hindered by the implausibility - would she really take that risk? When she was attacked, why didn’t Jeffries yell out of his window?
On my first viewing, I was expecting some revelatory ending that might justify the hype, maybe there’s a Psycho-level twist that explains why everyone thinks this is one of Hitchcock’s best. But nope… it turns out all of Jeffries’ suspicions are correct, Thorwald is a murderer, no twist, no surprise, everything the film was hinting at was exactly as it seemed 🤷🏻♂️
The final confrontation with Thorwald starts interestingly with Jeffries in the shadows, but the light flashes and subsequent fight aren’t great, and the effect of Stewart falling was as bad as those effects shots in The Birds.
I love Hitchcock, he can engross me like few other filmmakers, I fall under his spell every time… except with Rear Window.
Anyone else think The Master of Suspense was having an off-day here?