Paramount Pictures released Rear Window to film festivals around the world in August of 1954. But they released it throughout the United States on 1 September 1954.
Readers probably think of me as hating Alfred Hitchcock. This is not true! Well, Hitchcock was a terrible human being. But I like much of his work. What I hate is The Cult of Alfred Hitchcock. Those people think he’s an art film director. He’s not. He was a good (and sometimes great) genre filmmaker.
Rear Window is certainly one of Hitchcock’s best films. This is saying something! I really don’t like James Stewart. And he isn’t very good in this film. But the script is good. The camera use for the voyerism works as well as anything in any Hitchcock film. And perhaps most important, he doesn’t use any special effects or rear projection — things that he always did a bad job of.
On the other hand, we are still stuck with the Hitchcock colors. Technicolor was, for films of the mid-20th century, what the Yamaha DX7 was for late-1980s pop music. That is: it made those films age very poorly. And Hitchcock makes it worse with his design choices. (I know! He didn’t do it. But if you look at the art direction of Joseph McMillan Johnson outside of Hitchcock, it looks quite different.)
One problem I have with the script is the treatment of Miss Lonely-Hearts. She gets a happy ending, which I like. But all the stuff about her trying to kill herself is cruel. Plus, Stewart’s performance is mostly lacking here unless the idea was to make me hate him even more.
But Rear Window is a good and enjoyable film. It features some great suspense, which is what most people want from a Hitchcock film. If you haven’t seen it for a while, I recommend checking it out on its 71st birthday!
Rear Window (1954) poster via Wikimedia. It is in the public domain.
The guy who wrote the original short story was a troubled dude. And rich! He died in 1968 worth $850K, no small amount of money. All from his forgotten books and some screenplays.
Yeah, most color films of the period look like crap. But I don’t think Hitchcock remotely cared. You look at something like Notorious and it is shot beautifully. Other Hitchcocks from the same period look bad. It was probably just “hire whoever’s available.”
The screenwriter of the film wrote a book about his four films with Hitchcock. Sounds like it ended badly. But I just don’t have the energy to read the book right now.
Based on what I know, Hitchcock obsessed about a lot of things that I don’t think matter. And he didn’t seem to care at all about many things that did. But things do come together in this film.