So the story is pretty simple. A professional photographer has had an on the job accident leaving him wheelchair bound for a short period of time. In order to pass the time he looks out his window and spies on the neighbors in his apartment complex. While spying he begins to suspect that one of his neighbors has murdered his wife. One of the reasons this movie works so well is that there isn't much of a story structure, plot, musical score, or action. That probably sounds incredibly stupid but for this movie it works wonders. A layer of the veil between movie and audience is removed because the usual elements of what we come to expect from a movie has been removed.
Most of the movie is simple. We are watching our neighbors. Notice I said we. Because there isn't a musical score, contrived storylines for other characters, or a twisty plotline we are simply looking through the eyes of our protagonist and they seem more like our own eyes than we are normally accustomed to while watching a film. We see a very attractive ballet dancer across the way, a pianist who is always throwing parties, a couple who constantly sleeps on their balcony, newlyweds, a lonely, heartbroken woman and others. We hear children playing, dogs barking, a piano playing, arguing, etc. We are watching a typical neighborhood that feels like a typical neighborhood. They are as much in our universe as we are in theirs. It's as if we are sitting in a theatre and looking outside a window at our neighbors and their everyday activity which is not so much dramatic as it is hypnotic. We are entertained by these people in the same way that our protagonist is. If there was something overly dramatic about this neighborhood we'd slip out of the powerful fictive dream that Hitchcock has so masterfully created.
We have this calm, entertaining voyeurizing, and we have an old Hollywood charm, but with a modern sensibility with the rapport between two legends in Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly who play the protagonist and his girlfriend. There is a certain peaceful joy watching two masters play off of each other and that adds to the overall experience of the movie. We have this voyeurizing that slowly builds in tension and in between we have incredibly enjoyable moments between these two characters. The first time we see Leeza Fremont, played by Grace Kelly, she is like a slowly descending angel hovering over the protagonist, L.B. Jefferies, played by Jimmy Stewart. I think most people would have a hard time not falling in love with her right at that moment. She is elegant, playful, and moves with an effortless grace. L.B. Jefferies is irritable, stubborn and sarcastic, but incredibly likeable because of his wit and humor. It's a classic Jimmy Stewart performance. They obviously both love each other but Jefferies believes they are from two different worlds and it would never work between them. He feels like he is constantly traveling, in danger, and she is used to a more refined life. Leeza continues to argue that it doesn't matter that they're two different people, that all she knows is that she is in love with him and wants to be a part of his life. In a perfect example of the conflict of the relationship but also the humor and playfulness they're arguing and Jefferies asks "Did you ever try to keep warm on a C-54 at 15,000 feet and twenty degrees below zero?" Leeza responds with a pout "Oh I do it all the time when I have a few minutes after lunch." I won't talk about it too much in this essay but Thelma Ritter adds another element to the chemistry by doing an amazing job playing a blunt, charismatic spark plug caretaker of Jefferies named Stella. Every word she says is amusing.
So back to the suspense. In the midst of spying on the other neighbors Jefferies also spies on a salesman named Lars Thorwald across the way who will become the focal point for the suspense in the movie. Through nothing more than his naked eye, or binoculars he sees a series of events. At first he just notices the man taking care of his invalid wife and her nagging him. We later see him bringing her dinner and going into the other room to make a phone call. It looks like she overhears him talking to another woman and she confronts him and laughs at him causing him to walk away in disgust. Later that night Jefferies hears a scream and something breaking. We fade to black. He opens his eyes in the middle of the night. It's raining and he sees the man leaving his apartment with a suitcase. We see Jefferies look at his watch. 2am. He nods off and opens his eyes forty minutes later and sees the man return with his suitcase. The man goes out again with the briefcase about five minutes later and then comes back again, once again forty minutes later. Throughout this whole scene it happens gradually and with periodic brief pauses to add to the sense of realism. Everything is quiet except for the sound of rain. We are in the dark and watching this suspicious, potentially scary activity gradually taking place and once again, because of the lack of an involving plot, musical score, cluster of character arcs, it feels so real and in effect so eery. In Jefferies eyes we see more and more concern.
The next morning we once again see all of the activity of the neighbors giving everything a feeling of normalcy, which held against the evenings events makes those events creepier. Here in the middle of all of this is this potential murderer. He doesn't seem evil, he doesn't seem like a killer. He's your neighbor and this removes yet another layer of that veil.
Little by little Jefferies is convinced that this man murdered his wife. The scream, the late night journeys, he sees him wrapping a saw in paper, he has her jewelry. It takes some time to convince Leeza but the fact that he still has her jewelry does the trick. What woman would leave her jewelry behind? Stella is also gradually convinced and the suspense builds. What's going to happen next? How far are they going to go? Can they prove his guilt? Is he really guilty?
The next portion of the film feels much like a silent movie. It is thrilling because we are watching something that we aren't used to and we are in a master's capable hands. The master of visual storytelling gives us a number of silent scenes in which Jefferies is watching both Leeza and Stella in danger and it allows for the use of humor, great tension, and the novelty of a different kind of cinema. In the first among many great shots to come that resemble a silent movie, we see Stella gesturing that she didn't get a license plate, then Leeza and her digging in Thorwald's garden, Stella gesturing that they couldn't find anything and all of this is amusing because everything has to be said through hand gestures, facial expressions, etc. It's incredibly fun to watch. The best of these scenes comes when Leeza decides to adventurously go into Thorwald's apartment while he's not there and look for his wife's wedding ring as proof that he murdered her. For one thing there isn't a thing he can do. He's confined to his wheelchair as are we. We are powerless and tense. She motions that there's nothing in a purse, once again amusing. We suddenly see Thorwald coming back to his apartment. Our blood pressure raises, Leeza hides, and he enters. There is this great shot of him turning around in his apartment and his expression has intensified. We know that he's found Leeza. We can't see her because we only see what Jefferies sees but we know, and Thorwald walks forward, and through the other window we see leeza walking backward. What a shot. There is a terrifying struggle in which Jefferies is suffering in his powerlessness and then the cops come. The end of this scene sees Leeza safe and there is this great playful image of her back to Jefferies at the window flicking her finger back and forth with Mrs Thorwald's wedding ring on it. She has succeeded and it's a great symbolic gesture because here is this woman who wants to marry Jefferies but is seen as not fitting into his adventurous dangerous world and she has just had a dangerous adventure and at the end of it she has a wedding ring on her finger.
In the last and quite possibly scariest chapter of this suspense tale we have a perfectly constructed scene of the villain pursuing the protagonist. Jefferies is sitting in his apartment alone. Leeza and Stella are at the police station. There is a phone call but when he answers it there's no answer. Jefferies is uneasy. Soon after this he hears the downstairs door open and close. He's frightened. From under the door he can tell that the stairwell light has gone out. A few seconds later there is the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Ooooh Daddy. He's terrified now and he's looking for a hiding place. The footsteps stop, the door opens and there stands Thorwald with intimidating intense bug eyes. Bow to the master.
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