Rear Window

UPC: 025192039522

Studio: Universal Studios

MPAA Rating: PG   Contains:[Mild Violence, Adult Situations]

Summary: Laid up with a broken leg, photojournalist L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) is confined to his tiny, sweltering courtyard apartment. To pass the time between visits from his nurse (Thelma Ritter) and his fashion model girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly), 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 (Raymond Burr), 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 Hitchcock'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. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Category: Mystery

Awards: Best British Film – British Academy of Film and Television Arts U.S. National Film Registry – Library of Congress 100 Greatest American Movies – American Film Institute Best Director – Directors Guild of America Best Color Cinematography – Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Director – Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Screenplay – Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Sound – Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Actress – National Board of Review Best Actress – New York Film Critics Circle Best Screenplay – Edgar Allan Poe Awards

Features: "Rear Window Ethics: Remembering and Restoring a Hitchcock Classic": original documentary featuring interviews with cast members Georgine Darcy, assistant director Herbert Coleman, filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich and Curtis Hanson, and Pat Hitchcock O'Connell, daughter of Alfred Hitchcock
"Rear Window" featurette: a conversation with screenwriter John Michael Hayes
Production photographs
Theatrical trailer
Re-release trailer narrated by James Stewart
Production notes
Cast and filmmakers
DVD-ROM features including access to original script

Rear Window

Format: DVD

Release Date: 03/06/2001

Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 Vistavision

Audio: 1 USA & territories, Canada

Runtime: 115 Minutes

Sides: 1

Number of Discs: 1

Language(s) English,French

Subtitles: English,Spanish

Region: USA & territories, Canada

Chapters: Menu Group #1 with 19 chapter(s) covering 01:54:05
1. Main Titles. [1:33]
2. The Plaster Cocoon. [6:52]
3. Stella's Advice. [7:07]
4. Lisa. [5:46]
5. Meet the Neighbors. [5:46]
6. Mismatched Lives. [4:47]
7. All Through the Night. [4:37]
8. The Wathcer. [6:25]
9. Something's Wrong. [10:34]
10. Doyle Investigates. [7:11]
11. Eyes on Thorwald. [11:31]
12. There's No Case. [6:20]
13. Rear Window Ethics. [6:20]
14. Message to a Murderer. [5:47]
15. Lisa's Risk. [6:30]
16. Killer in the Dark. [7:29]
17. A Few Changes. [5:37]
18. Restoration Credits. [1:50]

Lucia Bozzola

On the surface a comic thriller about a photographer and the crime he thinks took place across the courtyard, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) turns into an interrogation of voyeurism and movie-viewing. Keeping the camera in Jeff's apartment (except for a couple of shots near the climax), Hitchcock limits the audience's view to what Jeff can see and hear from his immobilized perch. He is free to take in the spectacle of the events in the apartments that he sees, but he is powerless to intervene. Why he looks, however, is the larger question; Hitchcock suggests not just that Jeff is channel-surfing among apartments for idle entertainment but also that the urge to peep is a more universal trait than we might care to acknowledge. What Jeff finds, moreover, becomes a fantasy projection of his own fears about his own relationship with Lisa. Jeff becomes a voyeur to escape, but his gaze is literally -- and violently -- turned back on him by the suspected wife-killer in his thriller narrative. Wryly entertaining as well as skillfully executed and thematically complex, the popular Rear Window earned Hitchcock an Oscar nomination for Best Director and inspired such later films as Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma's Sisters (1973). It was remade in 1998 as a TV movie with Christopher Reeve in the James Stewart role. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

Cast and Crew: Alan Lee  Actor 
Anthony Warde  Actor 
Ralph Smiley  Actor 
Dick Simmons  Actor 
Bess Flowers  Actor 
Eddie Parker  Actor 
Jerry Antes  Actor 
Kathryn Grant  Actor 
Len Hendry  Actor 
Iphigenie Castiglioni  Actor 
Fred Graham  Actor 
Ross Bagdasarian, Sr.  Actor 
Bennie Bartlett  Actor 
Marla English  Actor 
Harry Landers  Actor 
Mike Mahoney  Actor 
James Cornell  Actor 
John Michael Hayes  Screenwriter 
Alfred Hitchcock  Director 
Alfred Hitchcock  Producer 
Franz Waxman  Composer (Music Score) 
James Stewart  Actor 
Grace Kelly  Actor 
Wendell Corey  Actor 
Thelma Ritter  Actor 
Raymond Burr  Actor 
Judith Evelyn  Actor 
Georgine Darcy  Actor 
Sara Berner  Actor 
Frank Cady  Actor 
Rand Harper  Actor 
Jesslyn Fax  Actor 
Irene Winston  Actor 
Havis Davenport  Actor 

Country: USA