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Rear Window film review...by Tim Francis

FILM REVIEW for…..REAR WINDOW



Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window is a voyeuristic film acquiring four Academy Award nominations. This suspense laden movie develops easily from beginning to end. The storyline is about a wheelchair bound photographer who spies on his neighbours from his apartment window and becomes convinced that a murder has been committed by one of the tenants.

The film was shot entirely at paramount studios which included a gigantic set on one of the soundstages. Hitchcock carefully uses diegetic natural sounds and the drifting of music across the courtyard between apartments. Shot entirely in Technicolor and using Edith Head for costume designer ,as he did on all Paramount pictures.

One of the characters in the film, Stella(Thelma Ritter) comments to Jeff (James Stewart)”We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms “…this equates equally to the cinema as to real life. Stella signifies the specifically sexual pleasures of looking that is aligned with classical Hollywood depictions. Most of the film is seen through Jeff’s visual aspect and his thought processes and perspective. Hitchcock implicates us all as spectators as we view through the rear window, along with Jeff, to draw us in as Peeping Toms. We are watching him and the people he watches.

The elegant Lisa (Grace Kelly) causes Jeff’s passive attitude to romance to change when she metaphorically crosses over from the spectator side. The feminist approach in interpreting Freud within the cinema allude that women spectators of this film (and others) become ‘masculinised’. Poignantly, when Jeff is pushed through the window(the screen), he has been forced to become part of the show.

The way that one of the character’s composed music in the film is heard gradually and eventually in full at the end ,is climatically brilliant.

The subsequent movies released paying homage to Rear Window :- Body Double(84)… Clubhouse Detectives(96)… What Lies Beneath (2000)…Head Over Heels(2001)…Disturbia(2007) ....and Rear Window remake in 1998 are testament to the power of Alfred Hitchcock in being the master of suspense on the silver screen.



A FILM REVIEW OF ..REAR WINDOW… by Tim Francis April 2011

Film Review ...'PEEPING TOM'

                              PEEPING  TOM

Fifty years or more have transpired since Michael Powell shocked his way out of a professional film making career.

His decline and subsequent meagre filming life in Australia came as a direct result of both public and critical revulsion to this mass stabbing epic of voyeurism.

It’s cult status now as a movie which intentionally flaunts a lurid, shocking sleaziness is guaranteed.

In the early 1960’s in the U.K. the mood of the hostile reviewers and panicky distributors was in uproar. The disturbing enough by having a mentally ill murderer as its subject , but it very slyly becomes even more so by involving the audience in the action. The killer Mark (Carl Boehm) has a fetish-like fascination with the movie camera, and he likes to preserve the purest moment of fear by filming his victims as he murders them.

The directors influence by Freud is apparent in the entire film made in a psychological code, filled with clues and imagery.

The actual film does lag a little .after its lethally macabre and brilliant opening scenes…but if anything deserves the “dark masterpiece” tag, this does: a brilliant satirical insight into the neurotic, pornographic element in the act of filming, more relevant than ever in the age of reality television and CCTV.

The continuing use or Moira Shearer (The Red Shoes) as a dancer that also meets her end by the killer’s tripod with it’s blade like secret weapon sharpened to penetrate the most beautiful of necks….and the Germanic sounding anti-hero only served to alienate the uneducated bastion of amateur critics at the time ,that were spoon-fed by the elite control of  the U.K.’s film establishment.

The voyeurism,scopophilia and visual content of “Peeping Tom” were a measured artistic development in Michael Powell’s directional aims. He craved the controversy he knew would come .

However this reviewer is left with a feeling of ‘What if ?’ ….. with his understanding of the scientific gaze in the cinema from real life, as Michel Foucault acknowledges ,is at the heart of the advancement of knowledge in Western culture…then what other masterpieces would he have conjured up for us to view and drool over for decades.

A film and repercussion review of Peeping Tom by Tim Francis.