Critics reviews

Thorwald's eyes are an intense, burning blue, matching his blue suit, and Burr is so fantastic in this role, he manages to make Thorwald simultaneously menacing _and_ tragic. This is why audiences often gasp when Thorwald breaks through the fantasy – not merely because he's scary but because he looks so wounded. This is such a penetrating moment that the flashbulbs Jeff pulls out are not going to save him – his camera will not put enough distance between him and his subject.

The women in Rear Window outnumber the men but they also end up murdered, attacked, and/or broken-hearted. Having traded in their Edith Head gowns for more sensible trousers, they are now awarded entry into this man's life. He's napping mid-day—now with two broken legs—and only once he's fully asleep, will she reach for her copy of Harper's Bazaar. Being a woman is an old habit that dies hard.

Could this movie have been about any city other than New York? Possibly, but it wouldn't have hit the same truths. Because New York is a city where neighbors ostentatiously stay out of each other's business when they're out on the sidewalk, then go home and do everything they can to find out what's happening across the air shaft.

Through an alchemy yet to be duplicated, Hitchcock and writer John Michael Hayes got together and somehow fashioned the most perfect screenplay ever created. The characters' dialog as written and performed meshes seamlessly with Hitchcock's own monologue, one that brilliantly uses camera, editing table, and especially sound design. And its pacing is flawless; it's tightly conceived yet never seems to be in a hurry.

What do Hitchcock's comic strips add up to? All the little stories about the people around the courtyard — who also include a honeymoon couple with a sexually insatiable wife who keeps calling her husband back to bed, a recurring gag few other Hollywood directors could have got away with in 1954; an avant-garde woman sculptor; and a love-starved single woman — are variations on a theme concerning what it means to be part of a couple or to live alone, both situations being viewed darkly.

This thriller element presents all the stock characters of Hitchcock's earlier works, taken to their most extreme limits, since in the end one no longer knows whether the crime may not have been made a reality simply by Stewart's _willing_ it.