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!
Other 1 September Anniversaries
Filmmakers
- Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950): Writer who created Tarzan, John Carter, and more.
- Richard Arlen (1899-1976): Actor noted for Island of Lost Souls and The Lady and the Monster.
- Nathan Juran (1907-2002): Art director turned director of some amazing films including The Black Castle, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and more.
- Christian Nyby (1913-1993): Highly successful TV director. Following a successful career as an editor, he started directing with the exceptional The Thing from Another World, which is why we remember him.
- Richard Farnsworth (1920-2000): Character actor best known to psychotronic fans for Misery.
- Yvonne De Carlo (1922-2007): Lily Munster!
- Gene Colan (1926-2011): Comic book artist who created Blade.
- Lily Tomlin (1939-): Actor known for The Incredible Shrinking Woman and Krippendorf’s Tribe.
Films
- Lost Horizon (1937): A plane crashes in Tibet and the survivors find paradise.
- Isle of the Dead (1945): People get trapped on an island because of a plague and then things go wrong.
- The Creeper (1948): A mad scientist turns a man into a cat-like killer.
- Sorry, Wrong Number (1948): A bedridden woman finds out about a murder plot.
- Tobor the Great (1954): Boy-robot adventure.
- Bluebeard (1972): A man seduces and then kills women.
- Horror of the Wolf (1973): Japanese coming-of-age werewolf film.
- Dawn of the Dead (1978): Zombies in a shopping mall.
- Aenigma (1987): A spirit takes over the new student at a girls’ school to get revenge.
- Nadja (1995): A family of vampires deals with the loss of their father.
- The Prophecy (1995): The angels go to war with humanity.
- Highlander: Endgame (2000): The fourth Highlander film but really a sequel to the TV series.
- Altered Species (2001): A lab mistake causes super-rats and more.
- The Beast Of Bray Road (2005): Werewolf with DNA justification.
- Idiocracy (2006): A regular guy wakes up far in the future to find that everyone in America is dumb. Interestingly, the film seems to be most loved by the kind of people it is mocking. Typically broad satire from the man who brought us Beavis and Butt-Head.
- The Wicker Man (2006): Audiences have spent decades waiting to see Nicolas Cage burned alive.
- Bell Witch: The Movie (2007): A family is haunted — and not in a good way.
- Red State (2011): Boys are kidnapped by Christian fundamentalists.
- Little Evil (2017): A man marries a woman whose son is the antichrist. Wonderful comedy from the man who brought you Tucker & Dale vs Evil.
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.