After spending July discussing Joe Dante’s The Howling (listen), Ken Russell’s controversial Crimes of Passion (listen), and Lawrence Kasdan’s terrible Stephen King adaptation Dreamcatcher (listen), we’re sweating out the dog days of summer with Alfred Hitchcock‘s classic text, Rear Window (1954).
Starring Jimmy Stewart as a cad photographer with a broken leg and Grace Kelly as his too-perfect girlfriend, the film documents the perils of voyeurism as L.B. Jeffries (Stewart) becomes obsessed with spying on his neighbors.
When he begins to suspect that Thorwald (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife, Jeffries puts his life, as well as the lives of his girlfriend Lisa (Kelly) and his nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), in danger to discover the truth.
Will they find the missing body or is the crime all in their head?
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Episode 397: Rear Window (1954)
Break out that telephoto lens because we are spying on the neighbors with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 masterpiece, Rear Window.
Part technical exercise (a la Rope), part treatise on marriage and gender roles, the film finds Jimmy Stewart debating Grace Kelly while trying to solve a potential murder across the courtyard.
Plus: remakes (both official and not); immaculate wardrobes; Raymond Burr’s real-life queerness; and debate about who “wins” at film’s end.
Cross out Rear Window!
Coming Up Next: In honor of Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film, we’re opening up the Patreon vault for our supersized episode on their second film, I Saw The TV Glow (2024).
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for over 513 hours of Patreon content including this month’s new episodes on Hannibal S03 Episodes 7 & 8, Influencer, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Insidious: Out of the Further, and an audio commentary on 2022’s Fall in anticipation of its sequel, Fall 2: Deadpoint, coming out next month.