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I thought, though, Miss Lonelyhearts, who was heartbroken about her inability to find connection, was sort of a memento mori to Jeff, who used the imaginary New York wall to protect him from that kind of damage.
And, after all, we're not so very isolated. We just like to choose when we're not.
Are we supposed to wonder why since we can't take our eyes off her Jimmy Stewart seems to be looking out his window to avoid looking at her?
Sounds a bit like a personal problem.
The Trailer (very cool)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B6rfV_wH4U
Long pan across the set followed by one of the great screen kisses:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhynlS1-o_c
The ending (I daresay, no spoilers for this crowd!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpxdWollqSA
Here's a question: Raymond Burr's dye job: Yay or nay?
Cheers!
Larry (the former NewCritics blogger formerly known as The Shamus)
And whadda ya mean "former" - we have a looooong statute of limitations.
And ix-nay on Raymond Burr's dye but its patheticness adds to the character. Roger Ebert maintains that the murderer is completely unsympathetic and I don't see it that way. You see his horrid wife and feel for him, then the middle of the movie he's this sinister presence, but then at the end I'd say he becomes if not sympathy, at least an object of pity: "Do you want money? I haven't got any!"
A: For you to be somebody who makes ME more interesting to ME.
Also all of Dial M for Murder.
It's true about the corn field scene - Cary Grant walking around that crossroads seems endless. But boy, it works.
The one Hitchcock, aside from Torn Curtain, that I heartily dislike is Frenzy. Repulsive movie, and quite deliberately so, that's the thing.
Lisa would be a txt'er.
So many of the actors did their work across the soundstage from the microphones - intentional distance in the sound. Not an easy task either - for the small parts.
So, anybody think this lawsuit over "Disturbia" and Woolrich's "Rear Window" has merit?
As for Disturbia, I didn't see it but there's always a fine line with "homage" and "theft" in the movies.
When I have my De Palma cap on, then I'm okay with it because aren't all his movies about that?
A friend blurted out who the killer was.
And I learned that it wasn't really Angie Dickinson in the shower.
Angie, I hear, was disappointed to learn that too.
As for homages and lawsuits, I understand RW was already the subject of a precedent-setting copywrite case - it seems to attract litigation.
Thelma Ritter was the best thing about this film, IMHO - she was what the written story lacked, altho Sam was kinda Thelma-like. Kelly seemed to be there just for hanging clothes on, but I can't say I wouldn't've missed her - she gave Stewart's kinda creepy on and off-ness a bite.
The set fascinated me when I first saw the movie (I'm another who got to see it during its early '80s re-release). The sense of near-total exposure (no pun intended) for all the apartment dwellers unnerved me a little. I recall thinking that I'd want to buy some tinted windowpanes, fast.
wwolfe, you're quite right about the curtains-up quality of the film, Midway through, they're brought down by Lisa, who's intent on an intermission from the drama across the courtyard, but they quickly come back up in response to the scream that announces the death of the dog. [As in classical drama, the deaths occur "off."] Also, every sequence of the film begins/ends with a fade, which only adds to the theatrical feel.
But about that dog. I think it's quite right to presume the couple is childless. They're so sexless! We're shown as much as the camera makes its first investigation of the neighboring apartments in the morning, when an alarm clock prompts them to sit up from their improvised bed on the fire escape. Not only are they sleeping in the public eye, they're sleeping head to toe, two decisions that seem to rule out acts of a generative nature, shall we say.
But not everyone in the film is childless. In the second counter-clockwise investigatory pan, at dusk, the camera just barely glimpses a father and daughter, I believe. The gender may be off, but we do see a parent and a child out on a balcony, way up at the top of the frame in the right-hand corner of the courtyard, past the musician's enviable apartment but before the camera reveals that amazing sunset sky over Miss Torso's. And there are shrieking children playing in the opening between buildings on the left.
The Siren also mentioned our complicity with Jeff's subjectivity and his rear window ethics or lack thereof. We are implicated, but the camera doesn't always maintain Jeff's p.o.v. For example, those circular surveys I mentioned [there are three in all] seem to occur while Jeff is sleeping: at daybreak, just before The Kiss, and as the composer's "Lisa" plays on the soundtrack and we see the resolutions of all the little dramas, ending with Jeff and Lisa's own. It's as though the camera goes walkabout to help whet/sate the viewer's curiosity at key moments, rendering us just as guilty of peeping as Jeff is.
Which brings me back to the dog. These close-ups of the neighbors that the Siren mentions also can't be Jeff's p.o.v.--he's too far away and there's no masking to suggest that we're looking through binoculars or a suggestively long lens, as is present at other moments when we're brought closer to the action than is physically possible. More interesting to me is how these rapid close-ups of the women--Miss Torso, Miss Lonelyhearts--are punctuated by and linked to shots of Lisa looking out the window. Which would mean that the camera is positioned outside the window looking in, and the framing and the distance in her shots mirrors that of the other women's shots. It's such an interesting choice to collapse visual/spatial distance at the moment that draws everybody to their windows. For a brief moment, they become people, not players, just like Lisa. And we're encouraged to really look at them.
Burr's hair dyed and styled to look like Hitchcock's former ball-and-chain, David O. Selznick. The glasses and cigar, as well.
And Notorious begins in Miami, not New York City.
As for Rear Window--yep, can't think of another city where the story is possible in just this way. Manila's buildings aren't that crowded together, the neighbors are too openly curious, and it's so much noisier and more crowded. And children everywhere--can't think of an apartment building in the city that's entirely without kids.
There is a Filipino film about voyeurism, though: Scorpio Nights, where a college student lives above a young housewife's apartment, and peeks at her through a hole in the floor. Every night when the woman's husband comes home, she's asleep; the husband kicks off his shoes, eats a meal already prepared for him at a table beside the bed (it's a studio), climbs into bed, and makes love to her. One day the student notices that the woman's door is unlocked; exactly like the husband he walks in, kicks off his shoes, eats the prepared meal, climbs into bed with her.
And so it goes. Unlikely, but it actually plays better than it probably sounds on paper, a kind of erotic allegory on the political oppression happening at the time (the husband, a night shift security guard, represents the Marcos regime). I think the two films would make an interesting double bill.