THOUGH IT ONLY MENTIONS the movies once, and then obliquely (waving her negligée under Jimmy Stewart’s nose, Grace Kelly refers to it as a”preview of coming attractions”), Hitchcock’s Rear Window stands as perhaps the greatest film whose subject is film itself: sitting in the dark, watching stories play out on a screen/through a window. Now it has had a complete restoration by Robert Harris and James Katz — the same pair who cleaned up Vertigo a few years back, but foolishly “re-Foleyed” the soundtrack, resulting in egregiously loud sound effects that distracted from the film. Fortunately they commit no missteps here; Rear Window‘s meticulous soundtrack has merely been cleaned up and left in its original brilliance, while the picture’s Technicolor seems as fresh as newly applied paint, the rosy Manhattan sunset and Kelly’s ivory skin becoming especially luminous.
Most important, the restoration is an excuse for Universal to put Rear Window back in theaters, the only forum it should ever be seen in — not just for the standard reasons about screen size and darkened auditoriums, but because it’s there that our identification with Stewart’s character is complete. Like him, we’re immobilized (albeit willingly), looking for a diversion from our dreary routine, and hoping to find it through a little harmless voyeurism. So we sit and snoop; we make up names for the participants we see. We look in on the Young Composer struggling to finish his tune, on sad Miss Lonely-Hearts, on Miss Torso’s sexy, peekaboo exercises, and on the Salesman and his squabbling wife.
How exciting it is when murder comes into the picture, so unexpected and comic — so very Hitchcockian. Which makes it the “movie” we choose to watch. It’s got everything we need in a movie: thrills, chills, drama, and suspense. Perhaps the wittiest joke of Hitchcock’s career was his hints that maybe we’ve chosen the wrong story — that along with Stewart we are watching a movie while life goes on in other windows. When the bulky, menacing Salesman is finally revealed as pathetic, terrified Lars Thornwald, it’s almost anticlimactic. As for Miss Lonely-Hearts, however — you can’t help wondering what her story is.