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DVD Rear Window (Collector's Edition)
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
So you've got this photojournalist took a spill at the track and he's just lounging around with not a care in the world and what does he do but spy on innocent dames getting undressed like a super-perv. And he's already got this hot cupcake he's just giving the cold shoulder cuz she likes it, sick bobby-soxer. And this bloke wants all the broads in the apartment complex so when Perry Mason begins sniffing around for a date, George Bailey creates these fantasies involving murder and nighttime gardening. And the F-er actually gets away with it. And everyone crowns it a masterpiece because we celebrate voyeurism in this country. Why else do you think there are spy cameras everywhere? It's sickening and I'm not having any of it.
Suspense at its best
Alfred Hitchcock works wonders in relating what the actual movie audience does -- sit in a theater and watch events unfold througout a narrative sequence -- by portraying that in his film "Rear Window."
Through the eyes of Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart), we see the events that lead up to the suspicion of a murder that happens across his courtyard. He sees the events unfold through the window of his apartment, just as we see them on the movie screen.
Hitchcock uses suspense, point of view and camera angles to suck the audience into his own little movie world, with just a little voyueristic flair thrown in.
An All-time Suspense Flick
With the sizzling success of Psycho behind him, Alfred Hitchcock had a tall order to ride his hot streak of stellar movies. The follow-up was not the thriller Psycho was, but just as memorable with just as equal appreciation from fans and critics alike. Rear Window brought the taboo of voyeurism to the big screen with credible actors and actresses justifying the ethics of meddling in others affairs.
With Hitchcock at the helm, you could have betted he would feature actors and actresses he had worked with before. The casting of James Stewart as the indecisively contained L.B. Jeffries sets a standard for quality immediately. Through Jefferies, the viewer is taken on a ride featuring the neighborhoods finest and not so finest. His recent confinement has consumed him with others affairs and it takes the ultimate step to personal involvement. His romantic interest is the beautiful Grace Kelly who plays Lisa. She is as empowered a woman can be given the time period and is insistent on joining Jefferies in marriage. Her devotion to him is tested as he carries on in his obsession. She is at first resistant to his new hobby, but finds the voyeurism as a means to get closer to L.B.
The movie's first half is effective in developing major and minor characters. The second half is as thrilling a movie can ever get. Specifically, the last half hour is breathtaking and beautifully shot equally.
A suave tennis player (Ray Milland) plots the perfect murder, the dispatching of his wealthy wife (Grace Kelly), who is having an affair with a writer (Robert Cummings). Amazingly, the wife manages to stave off her attacker, a twist of fate that challenges the hubby's talent for improvisation. Alfred Hitchcock wisely stuck to the stage origins of Dial M for Murder, ignoring the temptation to "open up" the material from the home of the unhappy couple. The result may not be one of Hitchcock's deepest films, but it's a thoroughly engaging chamber movie. It also features Grace Kelly at her loveliest, the same year she made Rear Window with Hitchcock. Dial M for Murder was filmed in the briefly trendy 3-D process, and Hitchcock shot some scenes to bring out the depth of... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Ray Milland - Grace Kelly Director(s): Alfred Hitchcock DVD Release Date: Released the 07 September 2004 Usually ships in 6 to 7 days
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A strong candidate for the most sheerly entertaining and enjoyable movie ever made by a Hollywood studio (with Citizen Kane, Only Angels Have Wings and Trouble in Paradise running neck and neck). Positioned between the much heavier and more profoundly disturbing Vertigo (1958) and the stark horror of Psycho (1960), North by Northwest (1959) is Alfred Hitchcock at his most effervescent in a romantic comedy-thriller that also features one of the definitive Cary Grant performances. Which is not to say that this is just "Hitchcock Lite"; seminal Hitchcock critic Robin Wood (in his book Hitchcock's Films Revisited) makes an airtight case for this glossy MGM production as one of The Master's "unbroken series of masterpieces from Vertigo to... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Cary Grant - Eva Marie Saint DVD Release Date: Released the 07 September 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This minor 1955 work by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the lighter entries of his creative peak in the 1950s, is still imbued with the master's stock themes of shared guilt and romantic ambivalence. It is also hardly lacking in Hitchcockian cinematic inventiveness, such as a famous, often-imitated sequence in which some smooching between stars Cary Grant and Grace Kelly is intercut with a fireworks show that just happens to be going on outside in a Riviera setting. Grant plays a reformed cat burglar who is suspected of reviving his trade, though he knows someone else is using his old methods. A very enjoyable experience, but don't get this confused with Hitchcock's other Cary Grant film of that decade, which was a masterpiece: North by Northwest.--Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Cary Grant - Grace Kelly DVD Release Date: Released the 05 November 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Although it wasn't a box-office success when originally released in 1958, Vertigo has since taken its deserved place as Alfred Hitchcock's greatest, most spellbinding, most deeply personal achievement. In fact, it consistently ranks among the top 10 movies ever made in the once-a-decade Sight & Sound international critics poll, placing at number 4 in the most recent survey. (Universal Pictures' spectacularly gorgeous 1996 restoration and rerelease of this 1958 Paramount production was a tremendous success with the public, too.) James Stewart plays a retired police detective who is hired by an old friend to follow his wife (a superb Kim Novak, in what becomes a double role), whom he suspects of being possessed by the spirit of a dead madwoman. The detective and the disturbed... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Kim Novak - James Stewart DVD Release Date: Released the 31 March 1998 Usually ships in 24 hours
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At last--a great American movie available on video for the first time in its original aspect ratio. For all the slasher pictures that have ripped off Psycho (and particularly its classic set piece, the "shower scene"), nothing has ever matched the impact of the real thing. More than just a first-rate shocker full of thrills and suspense, Psycho is also an engrossing character study in which director Alfred Hitchcock skillfully seduces you into identifying with the main characters--then pulls the rug (or the bathmat) out from under you. Anthony Perkins is unforgettable as Norman Bates, the mama's boy proprietor of the Bates Motel; and so is Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, who makes an impulsive decision and becomes a fugitive from the law, hiding out at Norman's roadside inn for... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Janet Leigh - Anthony Perkins DVD Release Date: Released the 27 May 1998 Usually ships in 24 hours
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