For a housebound James Stewart, staring out at the neighbours becomes an all-consuming obsession. Luckily he has Grace Kelly to help sort truth from fantasySee the other classic missed films in this seriesSome turned to Contagion, but the film I decided to watch in the first week of the lockdown was Rear Window, which turns out to be as close to having a Secret Cinema-type experience from the confines of one’s home as it is possible to have. I am not sure why this particular Hitchcock, out of all the big Hitchcocks, was the one I had left unwatched, though I suspect it could be due to me confusing the title with “rearview mirror”, which left a low hum of an idea in the back of my mind that it was about cars. I knew that it was about voyeurism, and witnessing a murder, but what I did not know was how perfect a film it would be to watch in a time of lockdown.
It’s as if, in 1954, Hitchcock had a glimpse of what would happen in 2020, and cooked this up especially. It is not simply the fact that it’s about being stuck at home, watching what other people get up to when they, too, are at home. Under usual circumstances, the voyeurism of James Stewart’s Jeff, the photographer out of action with a broken leg, should be intrusive and uncomfortable. As he ogles Miss Torso, he should be taking his nurse Stella’s blunt advice: “You know in the old days, they used to put your eyes out with a red hot poker,” she chastises him, when she catches him spying on the neighbours again. “What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.”