Room with a Review

Having recently had luck watching Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho ("luck" in that I found it to be one of the rare "classic" films that was indeed a good movie, in my opinion), I decided to take a look at another famous Hitchcock effort I'd never seen, Rear Window. It was another success, but a rockier road getting there.

Rear Window was very definitely divided into three acts, and not of equal length. Put simply, in the first act, the first 45 minutes of the film, nothing happens. It's a long, drawn out setting up of the main character played by James Stewart, his girlfriend played by Grace Kelly, and a couple other secondary characters. It's an even longer laying out of the geography -- the apartment complex in which the character lives, and information (too labored to call "vignettes") of all the neighbors across the way that can be glimpsed through their windows.

To some extent, all of this material is of course necessary for the tale that follows to have context and importance. You have to invest in the characters for any of it to matter. But I really started to get bored, almost nodding off, about 20 minutes in. I was heading toward a pretty dim view of the movie when, by nearly the halfway point of its hour and 50 minutes run time, nothing of importance had occured.

But finally, act two began. And then things started to get considerably more interesting. The really neat twist on the film is that when the mystery finally arrives, it's not a "whodunit," it's a "wazitreallydunatall?" We aren't shown any conclusive evidence of a crime, and the film becomes just as much about the possible unraveling of the main character as the possible crime in the apartment across the courtyard.

And then came the last act, the final 20 minutes, and it was spectacular -- a wonderful sequence of tension and drama. Without resorting to modern cheap tricks of loud music stings and mischievous camera cutting, the movie draws you up in your seat, eager and engaged. It's 55 years since the movie was made, but the final act set me on edge more effectively than a great many supposed thrillers of the last decade.

All told, I still can't overlook a near-excruciating opening that runs at least 15 minutes too long, and so I didn't find it as great a movie as Psycho. But it's still one well worth seeing, to any of you who have some how missed it as I had. I rate it a B-.