Dour photojournalistJimmy Stewart sits with a broken leg watching a split-screen "film" outhis rear window: the lives of his big-city neighbors are played out inpantomime with tantalizing snippets of sound and ingeniouslychoreographed framing. Stewart is the perfect captive audience, for amovie or a murder. Rear Window is Hitchcock's brilliant meditation oncinema and voyeurism, on how we can create scenarios to frightenourselves, and maybe get killed in the process. With Grace Kelly'selegant enthusiasm playing cat and mouse (or spider and fly) withStewart's morbidity, Thelma Ritter and Wendell Corey bustling betweenthe lovers to keep them PG, and the lugubrious Raymond Burr as asuspected wife-butcher, this is at once Hitchcock's most enchanting andominous film.