Rear Window 1954
I have seen Rear Window before and really liked it. The 4k digital version was on sale at Vudu and I had some credits so it seemed like a good purchase. Watching again, it is still a neat movie, albeit with some flaws. Grace Kelly is not one of the flaws though I wonder why she would be so smitten over Jimmy Stewart and why he would try to send her packing. I think that problematic relationship is a neat way to occupy the audience while the drama slowly comes to a simmer, with some good dialogue too, as we watch Stewart and Kelly in his apartment, just as Stewart watches his neighbors. As we watch, we see Stewart enjoying a preview of reality TV, where he can’t stop himself from watching, and then feeling better about himself in comparison to everyone else. The big mystery has some nice ups and downs and twists with some good suspense, but certainly the idea of crazed killers coming after their victims has made a lot of advances since 1954. As suspenseful as it is, neither Kelly nor Stewart is really able to get away from the bad guy, though the astonishingly quick arrival of the police does keep things from getting any worse. I think the movie ends a little too neatly with the bad guy confessing because honestly I don’t know how much evidence they had other than whatever McGuffin was buried in the garden (which doesn’t make much sense since everything else was disposed of). However it also doesn’t make sense that he could kill his wife, marry someone else, and nobody would ever ask about his first wife. Also Hitchock uses some pretty lame special effects at the climax of the movie including some weird fast motion of people trying to help, the ineffective post-flash vision, and Stewart falling from the balcony. That is a bad combination of things in the span of a few minutes. Still, the romance works pretty well, and the stories of the neighbors are a fun slice of life, even if the main conflict is a little underwhelming (possibly limited by production codes of the time).
The 4k version of the movie, not surprisingly, is pretty disappointing. Even with better color from HDR, the movie is old enough that not much is really being saved other than film grain and the colors are a little off, plus Hitchocock tended to use a soft lens on Grace Kelly anyway, losing any hope of a sharper picture. Hitchcock liked to make movies fast and cheap, so the film quality probably was never great to start with. Also the digital version has zero extras while the blu-ray at least seems like it was loaded.
Written: 22 Jul 2021
Owned on: Digital