Rear Window

Roger Ebert starts his review for this movie out with the simple sentence, "Now this is a movie." And I can't help but agree. And if you've seen it too, you won't be able to help but agree either.

I love this movie because it's fascinating, it's scary, it's Jimmy Stewart, it's Grace Kelly, it's Alfred Hitchcock, it's true horror, it's debilitating, and you won't stop thinking about it. Ever.



It's a Roger Ebert Great Movie. He says (in his original review), "Now this is a movie. Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" develops such a clean, uncluttered line from beginning to end that we're drawn through it (and into it) effortlessly. The experience is not so much like watching a movie, as like ... well, like spying on your neighbors. Hitchcock traps us right from the first".

And he says (in his Great Movie review), "The hero of Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" is trapped in a wheelchair, and we're trapped, too--trapped inside his point of view, inside his lack of freedom and his limited options. When he passes his long days and nights by shamelessly maintaining a secret watch on his neighbors, we share his obsession. It's wrong, we know, to spy on others, but after all, aren't we always voyeurs when we go to the movies? Here's a film about a man who does on the screen what we do in the audience--look through a lens at the private lives of strangers."



Rear Window was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

It's ranked 3rd in AFI "Ten top Ten" - the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres. The list was compiled by polling 1,500 people from the creative community. It falls under the category of 3rd best film in the mystery genre.

It's ranked #48 on AFI's 100 years...100 movies (tenth anniversary edition)

It's ranked #14 on AFI's 100 years...100 thrills



Quite simply, this is one of the best movies that you will ever, ever, ever see.
I don't know how else to say it.



I know I should have used this in my explanation between gore and horror, but here it is now:
"This level of danger and suspense is so far elevated above the cheap thrills of the modern slasher films that "Rear Window," intended as entertainment in 1954, is now revealed as art. Hitchcock long ago explained the difference between surprise and suspense. A bomb under a table goes off, and that's surprise. We know the bomb is under the table but not when it will go off, and that's suspense. Modern slasher films depend on danger that leaps unexpectedly out of the shadows. Surprise. And surprise that quickly dissipates, giving us a momentary rush but not satisfaction. "Rear Window" lovingly invests in suspense all through the film, banking it in our memory, so that when the final payoff arrives, the whole film has been the thriller equivalent of foreplay.
-Roger Ebert "Great Movie" review for "Rear Window"



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