Look

In Rear Window, James Stewart plays a photographer confined to a wheelchair because of a broken leg. 

Using binoculars, he spies on his neighbors in his Greenwich Village apartment- initially, to relieve his boredom. He suspects a man across (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife, and he enlists the help of his girlfiend Grace Kelly and his nurse Thelma Ritter to find out what the truth is.

Most of the action takes place in a single room and the rest, in the courtyard and their rear windows, making it one of those exercises in technical showing off.

I'm sorry to report that the movie did not work for me. I know the whole thing was supposed to be an essay in voyeurism, a treatise on marriage even, a Hitchcock classic- but it did not work for me.

I did not look away, and the last few sequences, in which they Kelly and Ritter do the sleuthing for the wheelchair-bound Stewart were riveting. 

But I found myself unable to suspend my disbelief, given the guesses and conclusions he jumps to with little shred of evidence. It looks like the whole enterprise hinges on Jimmy's performance. I did not grow up on Stewart movies, and I know he's one of the biggest movie stars of all time, but the nourishing of his screen image did not unfold before my eyes. 

I hope to like it when I see it again in five years maybe?