Rear Window (1954)

Laid up with a broken leg, photojournalist L.B. Jeffries is confined to his tiny, sweltering courtyard apartment. To pass the time between visits from his nurse and his fashion model girlfriend Lisa, the binocular-wielding Jeffries stares through the rear window of his apartment at the goings-on in the other apartments around his courtyard. As he watches his neighbors, he assigns them such roles and character names as "Miss Torso" (Georgine Darcy), a professional dancer with a healthy social life or "Miss Lonelyhearts" (Judith Evelyn), a middle-aged woman who entertains nonexistent gentlemen callers. Of particular interest is seemingly mild-mannered travelling salesman Lars Thorwald, who is saddled with a nagging, invalid wife. One afternoon, Thorwald pulls down his window shade, and his wife’s incessant bray comes to a sudden halt. Out of boredom, Jeffries casually concocts a scenario in which Thorwald has murdered his wife and disposed of the body in gruesome fashion. Trouble is, Jeffries’ musings just might happen to be the truth. One of  Alfred Hitchock’s very best efforts, Rear Window is a crackling suspense film that also ranks with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) as one of the movies’ most trenchant dissections of voyeurism. As in most Hitchcock films, the protagonist is a seemingly ordinary man who gets himself in trouble for his secret desires.

James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr

1954, colour, 112 minutes