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Using the story of a wheelchair-bound photographer (James Stewart) who passes the time recuperating from a broken leg by spying out his window into the apartments of his Greenwich Village neighbors, Hitchcock made a movie that both encourages voyeurism and shames it, that refuses to condemn it or applaud it. (The film has been restored to its original visual sheen by Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz, the team responsible for the restorations of Hitchcock's "Vertigo," as well as Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus" and David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia.")

Rear Window Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr

For Stewart's L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries, looking into his neighbors' apartments is as easy as flipping on the TV or killing an afternoon at a matinee. A daredevil photographer bored out of his mind by his six weeks of confinement, Jeff turns the lighted windows on the other side of the courtyard into his own private multiplex.

I'm hardly the first critic to point out that "Rear Window" can be seen as a metaphor for watching movies, but it should be said that the metaphor only goes so far. There's a big difference between peeping at strangers and watching a movie that's been made for the express purpose of being watched. But Hitchcock was uniquely suited to explore what Grace Kelly refers to in the film as "rear-window" ethics.

Movies are often talked of disapprovingly as a passive activity. That's too easy. In some ways, Hitchcock's whole career, his oft-quoted preference for suspense over surprise, was a black joke played on moviegoer passivity. An audience that possesses crucial information that the characters lack is both desperate to do something and excruciatingly aware of its inability to do anything.

In "Rear Window" Hitchcock presents a hero who is in the same position the director put his audiences in: a watcher who sees (or thinks he sees) what he is powerless to stop. Jeff is bored to distraction. "I'm going to do something drastic," he warns. And so, when he thinks that one of the neighbors he's been watching has murdered his invalid wife, he's thrilled. At last something has appeared to rouse him out of the stupor of inactivity and summertime heat. Jeff isn't the ordinary person caught in extraordinary circumstances, like Robert Donat in "The 39 Steps" or Cary Grant in "North by Northwest," characters driven to prove their innocence. He's not personally involved in the crime. He isn't horrified or frightened, or motivated by a sense of justice or outrage over a woman's death; he's turned on, which is made a bit too obvious by his use of a huge, phallic zoom lens to do his peeping.

The possibility of a murder gives Jeff the same vicarious thrill that sends him into war zones or onto the tracks of speedways to snap his pictures. (When an editor informs him of war breaking out in some new hot spot, he responds -- with pride -- "Didn't I tell ya that'd be the next place to blow?") Soon, Jeff's society girlfriend, Lisa (Kelly), and the insurance company nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), both of whom have been chiding him for spying on the neighbors, succumb to the same fevered curiosity. And since the promise of a mystery is the thing that's lured us into the theater, we go along too.

Except that Hitchcock doesn't make it so easy. Put in the position of watching along with Jeff, we see moments so private that our first impulse is to look away in embarrassment: A single, middle-aged woman, whom Jeff dubs Miss Lonelyhearts, entertains an imaginary beau at a romantic dinner for two; a struggling composer comes home late and scatters his work in drunken self-disgust. Hitchcock makes us aware that Jeff feels almost no sense of impropriety at what he's seeing, and he doesn't leave it at that.

Next page | "We've become a race of peeping toms"