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.