Rear Window
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by John Michael Hayes
Starring Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly, Raymond Burr
Released September 1st, 1954
Published March 12th, 2025
Alfred Hitchcock’s genius, for me, boils down to two elements: juxtaposition and perversion. Hitch takes a thing or a person associated with a specific characteristic and places that person or thing in a different context, one opposite to how we perceive it. The Birds (1963) is a great example. Before The Birds, no one associated birds with anything remotely dangerous. Hitchcock takes Birds and turns them into horror movie villains, convincing us through the use of storytelling and the tools of cinema that even the most innocuous animal can be used as a symbol of a battle between man and nature.
He enjoys this kind of juxtaposition in his actors as well. Take, for instance, Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Here, Hitchcock takes this bastion of handsomeness, charm, and good manners and repeatedly renders him helpless, hapless, and narrowly avoiding dangerous schemes not by his unending charm or good looks but by sheer chance and good luck. This flies in the face of our collective, cultural memory of Cary Grant as a debonair, accented charmer, a man constantly one step ahead of anyone he’s in a scene with. He is certainly the hero of North by Northwest but he does not drive the action, action happens to him. A leading man is supposed to be the catalyst of a story, Hitchcock takes the ultimate leading man of his time and robs him of his agency, forcing him to be subject to a plot rather than driving it. It's a juxtaposition of our expectations, of Grant's persona, and of the concept a leading man in a movie.
Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media
