Most of my repeat viewings of movies began when I was pretty young. The Princess Bride, Jurassic Park, It’s A Wonderful Life. I also watched quite a few less kid-appropriate films during that time—mostly from Kubrick, Scorsese, and Hitchcock. Of those, Rear Window still gets the most play. In Rear Window, you get all the meta, male voyeurism of movies like Vertigo (the viewer watching Jimmy Stewart watch some blond woman), along with the jaunty fun of Grace Kelly’s Technicolor wardrobe and Thelma Ritter’s morbid wordplay. There’s also this part where Stewart wrestles with Raymond Burr, who’s trying to toss him out a window, and he makes this sound, this glottal noise that is so unexpected and awkward and funny—something like “Guh-guh-guh-geel”—that I’ll rewatch the whole movie just to get to that scene. [Laura Adamczyk]
