notes@ucbcad.UUCP (11/30/83)
#N:ucbesvax:6100009:000:1257 ucbesvax!turner Nov 30 05:23:00 1983 I saw Rear Window the other day. It was OK, but not ****, like some reviewers are making it out to be. Given a choice between seeing it again for free, and watching "Vertigo" (or "North by Northwest" or even "The Birds") at 2 AM on our lousy little B&W TV, I would opt for the latter. Why? Well, for one thing, I like Jimmy Stewart best when he's up and walking around. Also, putting him in a cast up to his hips was an obvious way to deal with the problem of Grace Kelly being in the same room with him at all hours of the night. Family film, right? To give him credit, Hitchcock did do a fairly good job with the limited set he had to work with--one apartment, and an interior courtyard among several apartment houses. But Hitchcock is also at his best when *he's* up and moving around, since he uses countrysides so well, even when they're just painted backdrops. The color was still great, after all these years; far better than the recent release of Around the World in Eighty Days (maybe we just got an unusually bad print.) And Saint Grace's style holds up well, too. That's really the most I can say about this movie. Raymond Burr was atrociously underutilized, from a dramatic point of view. --- Michael Turner (ucbvax!ucbesvax.turner)