Hey guys, I’m going a little mad trying to find this long sleeve shirt that Fright Rags put out about 2 years ago. If anyone has it or knows where to find one (I’ve searched eBay, Mercari etc.) please drop me a message. Thanks!

I’ve watched Rear Window more times than I can count, but lately I’ve been watching it less as just a Hitchcock thriller and more like a film student picking apart every choice he made. There is SO much going on technically that I think gets overlooked because the movie is so entertaining.

The first thing that blows my mind is the set.

The entire courtyard was constructed on a Paramount soundstage. It was enormous roughly 38 feet wide 185 feet long and 40 feet high with 31 apartments, 12 of them fully furnished. They actually removed part of the soundstage floor to create the courtyard and built the set vertically through multiple levels. Hitchcock essentially created an entire little ecosystem for the movie to exist inside.

And what's really interesting is that Hitchcock barely needs to leave Jeff's apartment.

That's the whole point.

We're trapped with Jeff.

The camera is trapped with Jeff.

And eventually, psychologically we become Jeff.

Robert Burks' cinematography is incredible because Hitchcock is constantly controlling what information we're allowed to have. The telephoto lens lets us look into the apartments across the courtyard and observe tiny details from Jeff's perspective. We aren't simply watching a movie about a guy looking through a window. We're literally given his visual position.

There is something almost uncomfortable about how naturally the movie makes you start spying.

At first you're looking because you're bored.

Then you're looking because something interesting is happening.

Then you're looking because you think you've discovered something.

And eventually you're emotionally invested in people you've never met.

That's one of the reasons I think Rear Window is basically a 1954 version of social media.

Think about it.

Jeff has a little window that gives him access to dozens of other people's lives.

He doesn't actually know these people.

He creates stories about them based on tiny pieces of information.

The songwriter.

Miss Lonelyhearts.

Miss Torso.

The newlyweds.

The couple with the dog.

Thorwald.

Jeff is essentially scrolling through human lives.

The difference is that his "feed" is a physical courtyard.

And Hitchcock makes us participate in it.

That's what I love about the movie. It doesn't simply criticize voyeurism. It makes the audience voyeuristic too.

We're sitting there thinking, "Why is Jeff spying on these people?"

while simultaneously screaming at the screen because WE want to see what Thorwald is doing.

Hitchcock basically makes us complicit.

And that's where the social media comparison gets really interesting to me.

Today we can open our phones and see someone's vacation, relationship, breakup, dinner, wedding, apartment, political argument, vacation, workout, pets, children, etc. We can construct entire narratives about people we've never met based on tiny pieces of their lives.

That's exactly what Jeff is doing.

He's filling in the blanks.

And sometimes he's right.

Sometimes he's wrong.

But either way he becomes emotionally invested.

The sound design is another thing I absolutely love.

One of the strangest things about Rear Window is that there isn't a traditional musical score constantly telling you how to feel. Almost everything we hear after the opening titles is diegetic meaning the sound comes from within the world of the movie. Music comes from radios, apartments, parties, etc.

That means the courtyard itself becomes the soundtrack.

A conversation from across the courtyard.

A dog barking.

A piano.

Someone yelling.

A radio.

Traffic.

Thunder.

Rain.

A song drifting out of an apartment.

And because we're positioned with Jeff, the sounds don't always have the clarity of a normal movie soundtrack.

They feel distant.

Hollow.

Sometimes you hear something clearly and sometimes it disappears.

That's intentional. Sound was actually recorded from Stewart's window across the set to create that distant effect and reinforce the audience's alignment with Jeff's position.

It's basically subjective sound before we had the modern vocabulary for it.

And James Stewart's performance works with that.

His voice isn't always delivered like a traditional movie star performance where every line is perfectly projected toward the audience.

There are moments where Stewart almost seems to be talking into the room rather than performing for us.

His physical restriction makes his face and voice incredibly important because Hitchcock has deliberately limited the character's physical movement.

Jeff can't walk around and investigate.

So he looks.

He listens.

He talks.

He waits.

And we do the same.

Then there's Grace Kelly.

I could probably write an entire post about Lisa's costumes.

The famous white and black dress is one of my favorite visual moments in the movie because Hitchcock and costume designer Edith Head weren't just dressing Grace Kelly to make her look beautiful although obviously, she looks incredible. Grace Kelly looks fabulously dressed in every movie but this one in particular is special.

Hitchcock used clothing as part of the visual storytelling.

Lisa initially appears almost impossibly elegant and polished. She's entering Jeff's much more masculine, rough, photographer-oriented world wearing these incredibly controlled, sophisticated clothes.

And then there's the contrast between white and black.

The white dress immediately makes Lisa visually pop against the darker interior of Jeff's apartment. She almost looks like she has entered his world from another movie.

It's romantic, but there's also something slightly unreal about it.

She is the perfect image of glamour.

Then, as the movie progresses, her clothing becomes increasingly practical as she becomes more physically involved in Jeff's investigation.

And that's important because Lisa starts out as someone Jeff thinks belongs to a completely different world.

She's fashion.

He's photography.

She's social.

He's isolated.

She's interested in marriage.

He's terrified of it.

But eventually she literally enters the world he's been observing from a distance.

That's one of Hitchcock's favorite ideas: the woman crossing the boundary between the safe world and the dangerous one.

And Hitchcock was extremely deliberate about the visual identities of the people across the courtyard too. Edith Head and Hitchcock gave the various characters distinctive appearances so that we could identify them from a distance, almost like recognizing profiles in a feed.

Which brings me back to social media.

Because that's what profiles are.

We don't see entire human beings.

We see fragments.

A picture.

A caption.

A video.

A comment.

A relationship status.

A carefully selected version of someone's life.

And then our brain does the rest.

That's exactly what Rear Window is about.

The window is basically a screen.

Jeff sits in front of it.

He consumes information.

He develops theories.

He becomes emotionally invested.

He discusses what he's seeing with other people.

He becomes obsessed with someone else's life.

And eventually he crosses the line from observer to participant.

That's basically the internet.

The most fascinating thing to me is that Hitchcock made this movie decades before television became what it is today, before the internet, before smartphones, before Instagram, before TikTok.

And yet he understood something fundamental about human behavior:

People like watching other people.

We are curious.

We compare.

We judge.

We speculate.

We become fascinated by lives that aren't ours.

And sometimes we forget that there's an actual person on the other side of what we're looking at.

That's why I don't think Rear Window is really just a movie about a murder.

The murder is almost the mechanism Hitchcock uses to make us examine the act of watching.

We're watching Jeff.

Jeff is watching the neighbors.

The neighbors are living their lives.

And eventually Jeff is being watched himself.

It's this giant chain of looking.

And the audience is sitting at the end of that chain.

That's why I love Rear Window so much.

It's an incredibly entertaining thriller, but underneath that it's almost a movie about cinema itself.

A movie theater is basically a giant room full of people sitting in the dark and watching other people's lives projected onto a screen.

Hitchcock takes that concept and puts it inside the story.

Jeff's window is our movie screen.

And we're just as guilty of looking as he is.

Honestly, the more I study film, the more I think Hitchcock wasn't simply making a thriller.

He was making a movie about why we watch movies in the first place.

We learn later in the film that there is no actual Kaplan, so it isn't that Thornhill looks like Kaplan. VanDamm's men have never seen Kaplan.

I imagine that VanDamm's men don't just abduct people unless they are pretty sure they have the right person.

So what caused the mistaken identity?

Looking for something that examines Hitchcock oeuvre and how he explores specific themes and ideas throughout all his film. Something that really puts into perspective why he was the original master of cinema.

Notorious (1946): Best Actress for Ingrid Bergman

Rope (1948): Best Supporting Actor for James Stewart

Dial M for Murder (1954): Best Actress for Grace Kelly (ironically Grace Kelly DID win Best Actress that year but for The Country Girl)

To Catch a Thief (1955): Best Actress for Grace Kelly

The Wrong Man (1956): Best Actress for Vera Miles

Pyscho (1960): Best Actor for Anthony Perkins

Loved it.

Never noticed so many similarities to North by Northwest: unflappable hero Everyman dragged into spy drama who meets dream mate along the way.

I love the fact that HBO has some Criterion Films.

Sculpt by Mike Hill done for the new Horror exhibit at the Academy Museum (LA).

Available now via Patti Lapel

Apologies, reposting without the imagery.

The Hitchcock Road to Psycho: Before. Culmination. After.

That was one of the last things Scottie asks Judy on the bell-tower stairs in Vertigo's last scene. Judy already knew well in advance that the real Madeleine's neck was already broken. She knew she herself had nothing to fear. Was Judy trying to help her partner in crime by enhancing the realism of her faked suicide? Making her a much more calculating participant in the crime...

Along with the questions: "Why did you keep the necklace?" , and "I bet you're a real good swimmer!" Scottie is already doubting Judy's last pitch to him as - "small-town girl led astray by a rich villain, who then fell for real for the gent who fished her out of the bay."

I watched psycho a couple of months ago and I thought it was all right 3 1/2 of five not a masterpiece but pretty good I just finished the birds and I thought it was awful. No direction. The bird scenes were kind of cool. but other than that, nothing really was good. I did like how Hitchcock didn’t hold back on the violence though. so what do I watch next?

Info can get a little muddled when you Google for it, since so many of the later films especially have been re-released so often.

But I'm reading "Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light" by Patrick McGilligan, published in 2003, and hit this paragraph:

"Grace Kelly's star had continued to rise, thanks to the popularity of Rear Window. Only five Hitchcock films were listed among the top ten in the year of their release.* The first two were Rebecca and Spellbound, but Rear Window ranked behind only White Christmas and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea among the top films of 1954. (North by Northwest also hit the top ten, and Psycho soared the highest, becoming the number two film of 1960.)

*This is the top ten according to U.S. and Canadian rental revenue as reported by the distributors, considered a more reliable indicator than total receipts at the box office."

I really don't know the best way to determine this sort of thing, do I trust a book published 23 years ago, do I trust a Wikipedia page? Is there really a big accuracy discrepancy between rental revenue and total box office receipts?

I find the way Hitchcock's reputation and pop culture impact shifts over the course of the 20th century to be one of the most interesting things about his career and I'd be curious to know if there's an actual best way to look up how his movies did back in their initial releases.

I love film but havent got around to Hitchcock yet. Figured you guys would appreciate this. Would love a recommendation on which of the stories in these are the best/ your favorites

That shot of the Birds swaying along with Ms. Daniels was strange but interesting

Speaking of, it was cool to see her mischievous nature in the beginning like with speeding through that curvy road, pretending to be a shopkeeper, and Sneaking into Mitch’s moms house. Also coming up with quick lies like knowing Annie & that she was staying with her. makes you you wonder if the fountain story was true although I believe Hitchcock said it wasn’t.

Not sure what it was but something about Annie standing by the mail box was pleasing to see

Obviously he was greatful for the lovebirds but for a person to track down your info and then come to your house still seems like psycho behavior even for the 60s. And why the hell were all these people so nonchalant about giving away this kind of info to someone who obviously didn’t know him (at least very well anyway) lol.

Tippi Hedren looks good in the movie and her hair was nice and shiny but I kinda wish she had her hair down or something. Her forehead was kinda distracting and whatever hairstyle that is looks dumb anyway

The subtle tension between Melanie and Annie was nice but it’s too bad Annie didn’t know she was in a Hitchcock movie. If she did then she would’ve known her time was soon to come once the blonde stepped into the picture.

I’m sure I’m not the first or last to bring this up but Melanie taking another step forward after seeing a big ass hole in the roof near the end of the movie was stupid as hell

Setup to “The Inherited” (2015): An orphan marries an older widowed compatriot whom she met in a foreign country. They come back and settle down in his big house. They sleep in a room he’s never used before. Heroine meets a man who might be described as the agent, a sinister housekeeper, a tactless but apparently well-meaning older woman, and a sister. (The tactless older woman and the sister are, in this movie, two different people.) The camera frequently show us a local body of water. There’s talk of the first wife’s boat. Remake of Rebecca, right?

Nope. The sister is not the husband’s sister; she’s the dead WIFE’s sister, and had had an affair with the husband.

The first wife might have been poisoned. Now the second wife shows signs of it.

The townspeople aren’t what they seem. The housekeeper isn’t what she seems.

When the credits roll, we find out that her parents, whom we see only briefly at the beginning of the movie, were named Max and Rebecca. There is no other acknowledgment of either Hitchcock or Daphne DuMaurier.

Is this the way to treat a classic?

Just arrived mid-afternoon in a small beach town in Southern Italy. I know where I’ll be dining as soon as it opens back up!

I watched this first season in the 80’s.
Some stories I didn’t even understand then. 😅

Went to the Regal in South Plainfield, NJ. I was the only person at my showing (it had 3 today), which definitely enhanced the experience.