“Rear” by Alfred Hitchcock celebrates its 71st anniversary later this year, but see it again in March 2025, the film plays differently before.
If you have never seen it or if you need a refreshment on the plot, the film features James Stewart as a photographer who broke his leg and is confined to his New York apartment while he recovers. Building his mind after having been there for weeks, he is starting to look through his window and to spy on his neighbors, only to note that some of them participate in a suspicious activity, and he becomes obsessed with the determination of what is really going on.
By watching the film again this week, I was struck by the number of similarities with what we are going through now. The modern equivalent of looking out of the window our neighbors seems to look at our phones, which gives us a window to a much wider world, and I suspect that many of us have the impression that we are the character of Stewart, incapable of really TO DO Despite a testimony of atrocities to various degrees almost every day. Whether The bombs have always fallen on Gaza during a supposed ceasefire or look Donald Trump and Elon Musk flout the rules and essentially dismantle the constitution before our eyesThere is a arms to these world events which reminds me of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), the neighbor Grim barely disturbs the crime he has committed. There is arrogance to the character and these modern characters – an expectation that there will never be negative consequences for everything they do.
The rear window is still relevant in 2025
There are two particularly terrifying moments in the film. The first is when Stewart looks at the character of Grace Kelly walking in Thorwald’s apartment to get evidence that Thorwald killed his wife, and Thorwald returns to the house unexpectedly and begins to attack. Stewart drops and waves while he looks from far away, but he is in a leg casting and temporarily stuck in a wheelchair – there is nothing that he can do to save her.
The other terrifying moment comes during the end of the “rear window”, When Thorwald enters Stewart and Aggressant’s apartment. Stewart is capable of fighting a little using the flashbulbs on his camera to temporarily blind his attacker, but lighting this villain is not enough to stop him – he loads forward and finally launches Stewart from a window. Fortunately, in the film, the police are there to break the fall of Stewart and stop the villain. But considering that The social security net of this country is part of what is actively erodedand there does not seem to be legal consequences for war crimes Or incentive Or InsurrectionIt feels like not to be lucky when our bad guys come directly for us.
Writer John Michael Hayes, adapting a short story by Cornell Woolrich and inspired by several real murdersTapped in something with this story – something universal that has managed to resist McCarthyism, Cold War and a number of other metaphors of metaphors have applied to it over the past seven decades. (I had completely forgotten until this minute that I have already written on this subject as a metaphor of life in quarantine during the first days of the pandemic.) Hitchcock, one of the most famous directors that the world has ever seen, is probably better known for “Pyscho”, “Vertigo”, and several of its classics “bad man”, but “the” rear window “could well be the most timeless film of his incredible career.
I talked a bit about the film about today’s episode of the Podcast / Daily film, which you can listen to below:
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