Rear Window

Rear Window
Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, 112 minutes
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L.B. Jeffries, a successful action photographer, is stuck in his apartment as he recuperates from a broken leg. Jeffries is entertained by his nurse, Stella, his picture perfect girl friend, Lisa Carol Fremont, and, when they're not around, the neighbors' windows he sees from his perch. Rear Window is a film full of the story-within-a-story conceit, with each neighbor's window framing some kind of romantic story. In one window, Miss Lonely Hearts, in another Mr. Lonely Hearts, and in still another Miss Bomb Shell. Then there are the Newly-Weds, the Nesters, and the Quarrelers. In today's terms, Jeffries' view is a veritable cineplex of romance films where Jeffries can sneak from one film to the next just by turning his head.

The real story in Rear Window is whether Mr. Jeffries and Miss Fremont can make their own romance work. Hitchcock reveals Jeffries' rational conerns about marrying Fremont in Jeffries' dialogue with the maternal and practical nurse Stella. Hitchcock reveals Jeffries' emotional concerns about marrying Fremont with all those romance stories playing in the adjoining windows. When the Newly Weds spend days with the shades pulled, we know Jeffries can't wait for a roll in the hay with Fremont. When the Quarrelers have it out, we know Jeffries doesn't want to stay married past the honeymoon. When Miss Lonely Hearts drinks away her misery, we know Jeffries doesn't want to end up without a relationship.

Rear Window works on an entirely different level, as well. As a viewer of all these lives, Jeffries begins to interpret what he sees. When he sees, for instance, the lonely piano player with another man in the room (this is where Hitchcock makes his appearance in Rear Window, coincidentally), is it just a couple of guys listening to show tunes or is it the piano player's secret romance?

On a dark and stormy night, when Jeffries sees strange activities at the Quarrlers' apartment followed by the absence of Mrs. Quarreler, he presumes the worst. The drama that drives Jeffries and Fremont closer together is the discovery of what really happened at the Quarrelers' apartment. But along the way to that discovery, Jeffries asks whether looking into his neighbors' windows is moral, not because of what he's seen, but because of the conclusions he's drawn from what he's seen. It's the photographer's dilemma: does the picture show anything more than what is in the picture?

What turns out to be more important to Jeffries than understanding what he saw that dark and stormy night is how Fremont reacts. At first she hesitates to believe Jeffries' sinister conclusion, but then she grows to become his most ardent supporter. Jeffries realizes that, as foreign as Fremont's Park Avenue grace is to his rough-and-tumble correspondent's demeanor, she can sleuth just as well as he. What Jeffries and Fremont discover about that dark and stormy night turns out to be their love for each other.





Roger Ebert's Review.
N.Y. Times' Review.

Lacombe, Lucien

Lacombe, Lucien
Luis Malle, 1974, 137 minutes
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Set at the end of WWII in France, Lacombe Lucien follows the coming of age of Lucien Lacombe. Lacombe is tired of his cleaning work at a hospital. On a trip home, he finds his father a captive in a war prison and his mother's new lover pushing him out. Lacombe wants somewhere other than the hospital to call home. First, he attempts to enlist in the French resistance. Rebuffed because he is too young, Lacombe then heads back to work and accidentally falls in with the Nazis.

Lacombe comes of age as a Nazi who befriends the Horns, a Jewish family hiding in the small town where Lacombe works, with an alarming naivite about the struggle between the Nazis and the Jews. The film follows his transformation from a brazen, boorish thug to a young man falling in love and tragically learning the calamitous error of his ways.

In the end, as the Allies close in, Lacombe tries to escape with the Horn daughter, France Horn. They end up in a kind of Garden of Eden where they live in nature and avoid society's conflicts. While Lacombe's hunting at the beginning of the film seems boyishly sadistic and he uses his prey inappropriately to curry favor, by the end of the film he seems more in sync with nature when he kills his prey to provide for his new family. At last, Lacombe has found the home where he fits in.

Lacombe Lucien is slow paced, but Luis Malle creates many memorably uncomfortable moments to keep it captivating. When Lacombe brings a case of champagne to the Horn's house as a gift, he doesn't just give the gift, but forces everyone to join him in drinking the entire case as he embarrassingly tries to charm France. Later, when his mother shows up at the Horn house to warn Lacombe that he is a marked man, Mr. Horn and Mrs. Lacombe have an extremely awkward and laconic parental conversation about Lacombe.

On a sad note, Pierre Blaise, who gives a wide ranging performance as Lacombe, died the year after the film was released.








BBC Notes
NY Times Notes