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But as I watched this peerless piece of cinematic play for the first time since its last theatrical release in 1983, I was happily stunned. The subtle wonders worked by restoration director Harris and restoration producer Katz had managed to amplify this film's comic-dramatic weight without getting in the way of its fleet wit or its masterfully escalating momentum. Before seeing it with a cheering audience on opening night at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, I had thought that "Rear Window" called for the Katz and Harris treatment simply because it was a movie-movie milestone in sore need of repair.

After seeing it, I thought that it was not merely a deserving but an ideal choice. For one thing, this movie is about perception -- and the burden it places on the perceiver. James Stewart, the photographer-antihero with the busted leg, looks out from his New York apartment with his phallic long-lens camera. He watches a variety of marital and erotic soap operas from his rear window through the rear windows of his neighbors across adjoining courtyards. But he can't keep his distance when one of these mundane sagas -- about a traveling salesman (Raymond Burr) and his bed-ridden wife -- appears to end in murder.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

Far from being dated, this movie now comes off as prophetic: a forecast of the kind of close-yet-strange apartment or condo existence that would become a negative paradigm for city-dwellers, giving unwonted resonance to real-life tragedies like the Kitty Genovese case. And Hitchcock's treatment of the attitudes that Stewart -- and his classy paramour, Grace Kelly, and his earthy nurse, Thelma Ritter -- express toward romance and wedlock is spry and satirical.

Visually and dramatically, the blending of light and dark -- and all the muddy areas in between -- is what makes the movie's depiction of voyeurism so adult and cathartic. The parallels between Stewart and Kelly's affair and the stories behind other rear windows don't solely comment on love and marriage 1950s-style. They show that life is always bigger than our view of it. If Stewart thinks he uses that long-lens camera as a telescope, it turns out the reverse is also true: he is turning a microscope on himself.

In John Michael Hayes' script, as in the original Cornell Woolrich short story ("It Had to Be Murder"), we absorb the mystery as the wheelchair-bound hero does, from the blinking rectangles of light in the apartments across the way. Hitchcock designed the production around that concept, plotting intricate yet unobtrusive camera moves in a single enormous set. Built on a Paramount sound stage, it contained 31 apartments with eight furnished rooms among them.

The last release print of "Rear Window" gave us little except those blinking rectangles. The colors had faded, sometimes to nonexistence. When Burr puffed on a cigar in his darkened living room, the ash registered light gray, and when "Miss Lonelyhearts" went looking for love, she walked to a bar that suffered from brownout. The contours of the backgrounds had dulled, too. When Stewart, spying on Burr and then retreating from Burr's glance, pulled himself in and out of the courtyard lights streaming across his windowpane, he moved between glare and muck. And every apartment wall opposite him looked more California than New York, thanks to the soothing earth tones of an aging negative.

In the prints from Harris and Katz's restored negative, Burr's cigar glows red. Miss Lonelyhearts steps tentatively into a neon-tinged night-world streaked with all the colors of the spectrum, and the skimpy workout outfit of the aptly nicknamed "Miss Torso" has progressed from white to pink. Most important, you never lose the lived-in quality of Stewart's messy apartment (and messed-up life), even when you see it in shadows. And you gain a renewed sense of the weight and emotion of the lives going on across the way. With the heightening of the palette in her apartment, Miss Lonelyhearts brews up a forlorn romantic aura when she sets a candlelit dinner for two -- knowing it's only for herself.

The subliminal benefit of the restored negative is immense: it makes Stewart's (and our) peeping Tom-ism more of an adult game and less of a video game.

Next page | "You couldn't make 'Rear Window' today -- because everybody would have their air conditioners on"