Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954)

Screened with:
Chuck Jones' "Feed the Kitty" (1952)
Mark Har's "My New Life" (2003)

Consider the thriller. The world can be a terrifying place, yet most of us feel an inexplicable and irresistible pull to sit in a dark movie theater and watch a film that terrifies us. Whether it’s watching Mike Myers (not that Mike Myers) stalk a nubile Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween or gelatinous acid ooze from an alien’s interior mouth just before it attacks in the Alien films or a shadowy government conspiracy threaten heroic FBI agents in "The X-Files," we love to be scared.

In those examples the protagonists face overt, vicious monsters. (Yes, Your Humble Commentator just compared secretive, unaccountable government cabals to serial killers and blood thirsty aliens.) Alfred Hitchcock, on the other hand, dealt in a more subtle form of suspense, the thrill of watching ordinary people mistakenly get caught up in a life-threatening situation. In Rear Window (1954), Jimmy Stewart is “Jeff” Jeffries, an action photographer cooped up in his apartment with a broken leg. When he’s not fending off the marital advances of his girlfriend Lisa (played by Grace Kelly), he spends his time staring out his back window at the residents of the various apartments across the courtyard. And in one of the apartments, a man’s wife suddenly disappears. Jeff suspects foul play. Or is it all a product of his over-active imagination?

Say what you will about the suspense in this film, there’s a lot going on in addition to a few cheap thrills. Hitchcock, for instance, seductively doles out the minor melodramas of Jeff’s neighbors in a way that turns us into voyeurs as much as it does Jeff. It is just like Hitch to suggest impishly that the act of going to a movie is a form of voyeurism, especially if that film includes any form of intimacy. Think about that the next time you laugh when Peter Seller’s character Chance in Being There says “I like to watch.” Don’t we all?

Another form of fear we indulge in for entertainment is the urban legend. And while that may evoke images of sitting around the campfire, telling the one about the escaped one-armed psychopath and the hook hanging off the car door handle or the one about your friend who knows someone who went to a bar, passed out and woke up without a liver, local filmmaker Mark Har has put a little urban legend up on the big screen with his short "My New Life." Coincidentally, Har’s 15-minute film, which was shot in the Twin Cities area, has the feel of an episode of … "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" or perhaps "Tales from the Crypt." In the end, we here at Blake Classic Films are happy to give you the opportunity to gratify that funny little penchant you have for artificially encouraged fear. No doubt it’s a welcome relief from the real life fear of taking your AP exams.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser