Hitchcock's Rear Window

With Oscar night right around the corner, movies have been on my mind, and last week I happened upon a particular episode of the fabulous podcast Filmspotting, in which co-hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen pitted Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window against his 1958 film, Vertigo. The former has long been in my top three movies of all-time (along with Avalon and Cinema Paradiso), and after watching it last spring for maybe the 20th time, I determined that it was conclusively my favorite film. I was curious to see where Adam and Josh would land on these two films, especially given that Vertigo has long been touted as one of the top two or three movies of all-time on many lists. I needn’t have worried. A few minutes in, I learned that Josh’s default answer for his favorite film has been Rear Window for quite a while.

Not that I needed the validation. I first saw the film at summer camp in Madison, Wisconsin, between my sophomore and junior years of high school, where my fellow music nerds and I would gather in the cafeteria at night to watch movies. Rear Window and Psycho were on the docket that summer, and from that point on, I was all in. For the next half a decade or so it was all Hitchcock, all the time. I rented every movie I could find (oddly, the nearby Sentry grocery store had virtually all of Hitchcock’s 1950s films available for rental on VHS), borrowed several books from the local library (eventually purchasing the wonderful book of filmmaker François Truffaut’s interviews of Hitchcock), and eventually used my newfound knowledge to write a paper for Mrs. Kossoris’s senior English composition class. I was kind of a Hitchcock bully for a while, subjecting many friends to a movie rental night of a subpar film (Topaz and Torn Curtain come to mind) after likely forcing the critical decision at the video rental store.

My enthusiasm for Hitchcock films has been tempered only somewhat since my teenage years, mostly because I started with the best. Rear Window was the first one I saw, and it is indeed his masterpiece. Others have been a hell of a lot of fun: The Lady Vanishes, Lifeboat, Notorious, North by Northwest, Psycho – but nothing rises to the same level of Rear Window, not even Vertigo. That film is wonderful for its creepiness, its pacing, its dreamlike atmosphere and swirling score, not to mention the superb acting of Jimmy Stewart yet again, but there are more holes in Vertigo’s plot than there are in a Chinese checkers board. Suspension of disbelief is sometimes required when watching film, and I love Vertigo, but I never finish the movie feeling entirely satisfied, similar to how I feel after purchasing a new car and wondering if I’ve been taken by the sales guy.

With Rear Window, the only lingering feelings are those of pure delight. When I first viewed the film in 1984, I was positively captivated by Grace Kelly, enthralled with the comedic banter between her, Stewart and the amazing Thelma Ritter, and stressed out beyond belief at the film’s climax. Unfortunately, suspense can’t really be easily duplicated after multiple viewings, and though I may no longer fear for Lisa Fremont’s life when she’s caught in Lars Thorwald’s apartment, Hitchcock’s deft direction and the smart dialogue of screenwriter John Michael Hayes keeps this movie from getting stale even after several viewings. Hayes may not be a household name – I had to look it up for this blog – but he hit the ball out of the park on this one, not just for its entertainment value, but for its larger themes of voyeurism, isolation, loneliness, and what it means to be a neighbor, issues that sadly feel as on-point today as they likely did in 1954.

Other films I’ve seen have knocked me off my feet for a variety of reasons: Broadcast News, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Goodfellas, Beginners, High Fidelity, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Witness for the Prosecution, The Big Short, Charade, Parasite, Holiday, Amadeus, Schindler’s List, Elf, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Searching for Sugarman, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Get Out, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Roman Holiday, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, I Tonya, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Wall*E, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tar, Finding Nemo, Fiddler on the Roof, Long Shot, Michael Clayton, Magnolia, The Great Escape, It’s a Wonderful Life, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense…

But if I had only one film to live with for the rest of my life (not counting trilogies and the like), Rear Window is tops for me.

Now, onto the 2024 Oscars!

The Film, Avalon

If pressed to name my favorite movie of all time, I’ll either answer Rear Window, Hitchock’s 1954 suspense thriller, or Avalon, Barry Levinson’s 1990 family biopic. The latter barely registered at the box office when it was released during my final semester of college, but its absence from Best Picture contention a few months later was – in my mind – a glaring omission. I thought it was cinematic perfection, the very reason we have “the movies.” It’s also the kind of film that is no longer made. But back in 1990, Levinson, riding high after his Oscar win for Rain Main two years earlier, was largely given free rein to write and direct whatever he wished, and drawing from his own childhood, he struck gold with Avalon, a tale about the fragmentation of the family – and perhaps of society itself – after the rise of television and suburbia.

My roommate Mark and I had seen a preview for the film on TV, and we decided to devote a weekday evening to watch it at the theater near the capital in Madison, Wisconsin. The addition of a couple of young women – one of whom was transporting us to and from the movie – initiated a mild debate about which film to see: Avalon or Welcome Home, Roxy Charmichael. The latter wasn’t without merit: the poster offered an enticing Winona Ryder dressed in a hot pink dress, revealing quite a lot of leg, but cooler heads prevailed, i.e., Mark and I had made our decision and we weren’t budging, a dangerous position given the potential ridicule we might have garnered if the movie was a dud. Fortunately, by film’s end, all four of us were either suppressing tears, or – in the case of one of the women we were with – outright blubbering. It was one of those movies that struck a chord, with its themes of family, loss, and legacy.

No less important than the film itself was the haunting score by Randy Newman, which, although nominated, didn’t earn Newman his first Oscar win, however deserved (he could have just as easily won for his score for Awakenings that year, but that wasn’t nominated, and his first Academy Award win wouldn’t occur for another eleven years). The music from Avalon stayed with me for months afterward, actually waking me from dreams, all without the aid of additional viewings. I’d heard the score once, and my subconscious remembered it. It was that good. 

I didn’t see the movie again until the fall of 1992, when I recorded a VHS tape it off of cable, and I purchased the soundtrack on CD around the same time, eventually transcribing some of the themes from the score into a “piano highlights” piece that I still have. Nearly thirty years later, while shopping at a record store in Columbus, Ohio, my son came across a vinyl copy of the soundtrack, and I came to learn that Reprise Records released the record in 2020 as part of its “The Sound of Movies (…and Television!)” series, a noble endeavor for the movie/vinyl enthusiast. I now own Avalon on CD, DVD and vinyl, and the movie poster adorns my basement wall. I’ve seen in probably twenty times or so, and over the years I’ve enjoyed showing it to my children and a few friends who I felt might respond well to it.

In 2015, Levinson and Newman were interviewed about the film during its 25th anniversary, and it’s well worth a read if you’re a fan of the movie or the score, or both.

Here’s hoping the movie gets more recognition in retrospect than it did upon its release.