Classics at The Alameda: Rear Window

This week's classic at the Alameda Theatre and Cineplex is 1954's Rear Window, another personal favorite. It could be the Hitchcock film I've seen the most, though this was the first time on the big screen. The tolerable print today was from a fairly recent restoration; the projection had the usual issues with weak focus which, again, I don't fully understand but assume must be related to the quality of the print. At least, that's what I am now telling myself.

Hitch opens an intellectual can of worms in Rear Window - and his clock-winding cameo here is my favorite - before dashing out an ending almost before you know what hits you. I suppose that's better than dragging it out. I love Jimmy Stewart's curmudgeonly mid-period more than his early cockeyed gee-whiz persona and he's great here as the guy who tries to resist Grace Kelly, which is about the most taxing thing he's asked to do. I can understand trying to resist Grace Kelly. Any self-respecting man would have to at least try to resist her shimmering perfection. She is the Most Beautiful Girl Who Ever Lived, here playing the Cinema's Best Girlfriend, and one would not want her head to get any bigger. She doesn't really seem like she has a big head, but trust your instincts.

You still want to smack Stewart, though, each time he rebuffs her. There's a great deal more going on in this movie, of course, but somehow it feels like all that's really going on is Jimmy Stewart trying, and failing, to resist Grace Kelly. There's probably a lesson in there about movies and what they're really about and about movie stars and what they're really for, but I'm not sure I can articulate it. I just know that, if you've got Grace Kelly in your picture, all you have to do is get some guy to try to resist her, then put her in peril for a hot second and then you're done - which surely explains the wam-bam ending.

This is one of those films that has stood the test of time more for what it has said, and what it continues to say, about us than for what it's "about." I say it's "about" a man trying and failing to resist Grace Kelly's supernatural charms and also, okay, fine, some piffle about a murder and Thelma Ritter cracking wise. But all of that (apart from the Grace Kelly bit) is pretty inconsequential, by which I mean standard and rather forgettable. I mean, I never remember the details of this movie and I have seen it maybe a dozen times or more. I don't remember about the saw and the knife and the ring and the jewelry, I don't remember what happens to Miss Lonelyhearts or Torso, and I forget each time what finally clues in Raymond Burr to Jimmy Stewart - although if I spent more time worrying about the consequences of trying to resist Grace Kelly I might eventually put that one together.

Pretty much the only thing I remember, besides Grace Kelly, is Jimmy Stewart peering into that long lens, the "portable keyhole," as Ritter calls it. This is the film's key image, you might say, which is what Ritter's telling us if we'll listen. So, onto the whole voyeur thing and the psychoanalytic interpretations - but what about: how do we see the film now, as opposed to how it was seen in 1954? The characters talk about mid-fifties notions of privacy; how does this seem to us, in the age of Facebook and Total Information Awareness?

McLuhan must have loved this film. Stewart's camera technology extends his gaze deep into his subject's lives, but if they all turn to look at him, like some networked panopticon of that gaze returned, he might break and break again. What's worse, seeing or being seen? Is Total Information Awareness...death?

The MGM cartoon short, Goggle Fishing Bear, amused audience members, as did the following exchange between Thelma Ritter and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window:

- I got a nose for trouble. Can smell it ten miles away.
You heard of that market crash in '29? I predicted that.

-Just how did you do that, Stella?

-Oh, simple. I was nursing a director of General Motors.
"Kidney ailment," they said. "Nerves," I said.
Then I asked myself,
'What's General Motors got to be nervous about?"
"Overproduction," I says. "Collapse."
When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day,
The whole country's ready to let go.

-You know, Stella, in economics, a kidney ailment
Has no relationship to the stock market. None whatsoever.

- Crashed, didn't it?