New York in Film

APRIL 14, 2008

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A gander out the rear window…
In Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1954 film, Rear Window, James Stewart recuperates from a broken leg in a Greenwich Village apartment. He gazes out the window at his neighbors in rear-yards that bear an uncanny resemblance to the rear-yards between 9th and 10th streets between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas. The resemblance even includes a neighbor who plays the piano and in the 1940s Leonard Bernstein could often be heard playing the piano in the 9th/10th backyards.

In his great 2001 book, Celluloid Skyline, James Sanders notes that the movie “remains perhaps the most sophisticated and complex exploration of the movie city ever created.” “Rear Window’s pleasure, in no small part, grows from its extended view of a part of the city that often goes unseen, at least by outsiders,” he observed, adding that “it offers a languorous, urbane tour of the filmic city, the layered density of its setting more than matched by the complexity and delight of its multiple stories, all proceeding at once.”

James Stewart’s voyeuristic tendencies are aided by an Exacta camera with a big telephoto lens through which he spies on a neighbor he thinks murdered his wife. The film also stars Grace Kelly, at her most glamorous, who at one point orders “in” from “21.”

Carter B. Horsley

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New York in Film

APRIL 14, 2008

ALSO IN NEW YORK CITY INSIDER

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