Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s Behind the Scenes Pic!
Hitchcock’s Rear Window is a masterpiece of audience involvement. I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite of Hitch’s work, but it’s unrivaled at actually putting the audience in the shoes of the protagonist. In this case it’s a photographer with a broken leg wasting away the rest of his plaster sentence by spying on his neighbors.
The geography of the film is quite brilliantly constructed, giving Jimmy Stewart (and by extension us) just enough of a view of everything going on that when a nagging wife of a gray-haired neighbor goes missing we get just enough information that we’re not sure if she has left or been murdered.
There’s a lot more to the movie, especially with the rocky relationship between Stewart and Grace Kelly, but I’m focusing on the geography because that’s one of the great things about today’s behind the scenes photo. We get to see the set in detail, how it goes back in layers and is almost like an open playbox from the point of view of Stewart’s window.
You have all that, Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly and Hitch himself in this extremely well-composed shot!
Thanks to reader James Tate for digging this one up. Click for a nice big version! Enjoy!
Tomorrow’s Behind the Scenes Pic is waitin’ for us and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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