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Arts & Entertainment

Hitchcock Classics For Halloween!

Two Hitchcock films, Rear Window and Vertigo, to get you in the mood for a fright.

Alfred Hitchcock has been in the media quite a bit lately, mostly due to the unbelievable find in New Zealand (of all places) of his earliest surviving silent movie from 1924, The White Shadow.  This film has been lost since shortly after its initial release and the first part (30 minutes) of it was found recently in a vault in the New Zealand Film Archive and the search is currently underway to find the remaining parts of the film.  The White Shadow predates The Pleasure Garden (1925) which was, before now, Hitchcock’s earliest surviving feature-length directorial effort.  Hitchcock went on to direct over 40 feature films through 1976.  He passed away in 1980 at the age of 80.

In addition to that news, it’s Halloween season, where a good thriller is always a MUST! So I’ve decided to examine his more popular and admired suspense films. 

After a string of critical and commercial flops in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hitchcock reemerged with Rear Window. And what a comeback it was! James Stewart, who was appearing here in the second of his four Hitchcock films, plays L.B. Jefferies, a man whose leg is broken and his heart is torn between his lady love (Grace Kelly) and his wild, adventurous travels as a freelance photographer. With the broken leg, Stewart is confined to a wheelchair with nothing better to do than look out the windows of his courtyard apartment. While peering out at all hours of the day and night, he sees something that he cannot explain. Was what he saw a murder or just a coincidence? This film, like other Hitchcock films Dial M for Murder and Rope, has the capacity to be a mundane movie, since most of the filming takes place in one room. But, in the hands of master director Hitchcock, mundanity never even enters the picture. The courtyard becomes an intricate part of the story, allowing Hitchcock to open up the movie beyond just Stewart’s apartment.  Hitchcock also uses the perfect camera angles to heighten suspense at every turn. Not only one of Hitchcock’s best, but also the film that marked the return of the true Master of Suspense, who would never go away again.

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Vertigo is not an easy film to like. It also is not an easy film to forget and ignore. As years passed, critics began to see the genius in the film and started lauding it as one of Hitchcock’s most brilliant, yet misunderstood works.  James Stewart’s character becomes obsessed with a woman he is assigned to follow; he tries to recreate another woman to look like his obsessed love. It’s not exactly the best statement for women’s lib. But, I feel Hitchcock knew that audiences would be shocked and disturbed. An ordinary film comes and goes but one that gets under the skin can never be forgotten. This is not to say that, cinematically, Vertigo is not deserving of all of its adulation. It most definitely is, but it was the controversy and bizarreness of the movie that kept it alive in the minds of audiences, allowing them to give this classic a much-deserved second chance.

Rear Window: 1954, not rated (re-rated as PG), 112 minutes, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Wendell Corey and Raymond Burr. 

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Vertigo: 1958, not rated, 128 minutes, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes and Tom Helmore. 

The Niles Public Library owns copies of these movies on DVD. 

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