One of the Classics: Rear Window Returns to Theaters

Here’s a secret about English teachers: there’s stuff we haven’t read. Sometimes when we get together, we even talk about the major world classics of literature that we just never got to. I was even at a party once where it became a game. What classic haven’t you read? One professor copped to never having read Moby Dick. Another confessed to having only skimmed The Grapes of Wrath in college. It’s our secret shame. We just can’t read it all. I’m joking a little, of course, because no one can read it all.

 

It’s kind of the same with movies. Even though cinema is only about a century old, it would still be a challenge to see every single so-called classic movie from the last hundred years. It would be easier than trying to read every major work of literature since the dawn of the written word, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is there are important movies out there that we just haven’t gotten around to seeing, right?

Well, here’s your chance to see at least one of the greatest movies of the 20^th century and to see it the way it’s meant to be seen, in the theater.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 masterpiece Rear Window is coming back to the big screen for two days this coming week and will be in theaters in both Saginaw and Flint. In the movie, Jimmy Stewart plays Jeff Jeffries, a photographer laid up in his small New York apartment after breaking his leg while getting a dramatic action shot of a race car crash. Bored and hot, he spends his time looking out his back window, spying on his neighbors across the courtyard of his building. He watches the beautiful young dancer who spends her time rehearsing around her kitchen, the agonized composer working on a song, the older couple sleeping on their fire escape trying to keep cool. He also watches the married couple directly across from him, a traveling jewelry salesman and his bedridden wife. Early in the film, Jeffries begins to suspect the man has killed his wife. Jeffries tries to play investigator and spy all while stuck in the one room where the entire film takes place. What begins as a mild suspicion mushrooms into an obsession that draws in his home health care nurse played by the terrific Thelma Ritter, and his girlfriend, Lisa Fremont who is played with intelligence, light, and incomparable beauty by Grace Kelly. The film is tense and menacing but also surprisingly sexy and funny at times. 

 

The whole thing is a marvel of filmmaking. From the wonderful apartment building set to the purposefully orchestrated camera movement to scraps of noise and music that filter in through the window, every element is carefully designed to convey a maximum amount of story and suspense in a tight, economical 112 minutes. The whole thing is so perfectly engineered, you would think Hitchcock was a Swiss watchmaker and not a British movie director.

The version being screened on the 22^nd and 25^th of this month has been digitally remastered and will have the same if not better picture and sound quality than it had the day it was released just over fifty years ago. With an opportunity like this, there’s no reason for Rear Window to be the classic you’re embarrassed not to have seen. Set aside some time, take the spouse and the older kids, and go see Rear Window.

Back to the Video Store

A couple of years ago, an episode of the TV show Parks and Rec took place at a high school prom. At one point, one of the teenagers at the dance proudly proclaims, “I only listen to CDs. They’re the way music is meant to be heard.” It’s a funny gag because it pokes fun at our hipster friends who insist that vinyl is a more important 20th century invention than penicillin. It’s also an insightful joke because it draws attention to our nostalgia for certain kinds of media reception and how we often insist that we have just left the golden age and are now suffering through lesser times.

I thought of that joke last weekend when my wife and I did something we haven’t done in four years – we went to a video store. It was a scene you’re probably familiar with – it was a cold Friday night and my fingers were freezing as I was trying to scroll through the new releases on my neighborhood Redbox. Some guy was parked right behind me, his headlights blaring into my back, while someone else stood just a couple of feet away, disk in hand, obviously waiting just to return his movie to the machine I was occupying. Of course, the one movie I wanted was out.

The idea of driving to other Redboxes didn’t appeal to me at all, so once I got back into the car, I said, “What if we just went to a video store?” My wife looked at me as though I had just suggested that we go down to the malt shop for a sock hop or perhaps that we just head home to churn our own butter. But she wanted to see the movie too, so off to the video store we went.

 

As we browsed around, I was struck by how quaint and old fashioned it seemed to pick up actual physical movie covers and read printed words to decide whether or not we wanted them.  But I also noticed how communal the video store is. We listened to a couple in the next aisle argue about whether or not to get rent another Paranormal Activity movie. The girl looked at my wife and I and rolled her eyes letting us know this was not the first time she’d had this discussion. A group of kids ran around the children’s section, yelling for their mom every time they found something they liked. The clerks chatted with each other and made nice with the people checking out their movies. It was friendly. It was human.

The Redbox experience is quick and convenient at best, but awkward and a pain at worst. Streaming is easy, but it’s also kind of lonely.

Several months ago I did a show praising small, vintage single-screen theaters, encouraging people to support them because they’re a beautiful, elegant part of our past that deserves to be preserved. I’m not ready to say video stores have that kind of cultural value just yet. Right now, they’re an odd anachronism. Video stores are like 8-track players. They still work and there’s nothing wrong with them, but you have to wonder how long it will be before they get replaced completely. I’ll be interested to see, in the seemingly inevitable age of universal wi-fi, if video stores will become more like vinyl record shops – small, highly specialized havens for people who think they’re the way movies are meant to be seen.

This was originally broadcast on www.deltabroadcasting.org.