Rear Window (PG)
AFI Catalog; Alfred Hitchcock Wiki; IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; TCM; TV Tropes; Universal (AH:EC); Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Movies Anywhere; Peacock; Vudu; YouTube

This came out in 1954 (well before my time), and I didn't see it until 2018. It's considered one of the best films ever made, and certainly one of Alfred Hitchcock's best films. So... it's one of those movies I'd rate higher in objective quality than I rate my subjective enjoyment of it. Which is certainly not to say I didn't enjoy it, because I did. It's just that my personal appreciation for it isn't as high as the movie's quality merits. (Incidentally, after I watched the movie, I watched a theatrical trailer, which mentions "Psycho," which actually came out six years after this. So I assume the trailer included on the DVD is from a rerelease.)

So anyway, Jimmy Stewart plays L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies, a news photographer who's used to traveling all over the world for his work. But currently, he's stuck in his small apartment in Greenwich Village, just starting the last of seven weeks with his leg in a cast. So all he has to keep his mind occupied is staring out his rear window, basically spying on his neighbors. The most important of these to the plot is a salesman named Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), whom Jeff comes to believe has murdered his wife. While Jeff himself can't do anything to investigate, aside from looking out his window with binoculars or a camera, he gets a few other people involved. This includes his girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), his nurse, Stella, and a police detective friend of his named Tom Doyle. No one really believes him at first, though Lisa and Stella soon change their minds. However, on the night Jeff observed suspicious behavior by Thorwald, he fell asleep a few times, so he didn't see something viewers did: A woman leaving the apartment with Thorwald. This seemed to be his wife, so I think it was natural for viewers (like me) to assume Jeff was mistaken. And Doyle's unofficial investigations supported that assumption, but Jeff never gave up his suspicions. Personally, I kept thinking it would be most likely that one of his other neighbors would end up doing something terrible... whether murder, or suicide, or something else... (or something terrible would happen to one of them)... and Thorwald would turn out to be innocent. Well, I'm not going to spoil whether I was right about any of that or not. But I will say that regardless of whether Jeff's suspicions of Thorward turned out to be right or not, I believe Doyle's doubts were more than justified.

I want to say that I found very little of the film to be truly suspenseful or thriller-ish. (But some of it was.) Parts of it were rather amusing. I quite enjoyed Jeff's conversations with both Stella and Lisa (and I suppose with Doyle), which sometimes seemed like conversations you'd expect from classic screwball comedies. Although some of... actually, a lot of the time when he was talking with Lisa, he seemed kind of like a jerk. I mean, I understood his feeling that they were from two very different worlds (which kind of made me wonder how they even started seeing each other in the first place). And I understood his not wanting to give up his way of life to become part of her world. But his certainty that she couldn't possibly become part of his world, despite her obvious desire to do so, seemed pretty thoughtless and condescending (even if it was couched in the idea that he thought she was too good for him... which I think she was, but not in the way he meant it). Still, in the course of their pursuit of the truth regarding Mr. and Mrs. Thorwald, she clearly demonstrated that she could handle pretty much any situation Jeff might get himself into, and then some.

Oh, and I also want to say that Stewart's hair was rather conspicuously graying, which certainly highlighted the 21-year age difference between himself and Kelly. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I just found it weird that Stella called him a "young man," considering he was closer to her age than his girlfriend's.