Not that you asked, but I lied before when I said we weren’t going to do a damn thing on Sunday.

I’m going to pause here in order to note that my Kindle asked me if I wanted to add the world “damn” to it’s vocabulary. First, yes. Second, I’m shocked, just shocked to find out that Kindles are sold to the general public without the word “damn” already loaded into their memories. What will the kids think?

Now, back to Sunday:

I went downtown Sunday afternoon with My Darling B to see Rear Window at a free showing sponsored by the university because it’s free and it’s Hitchcock but mostly because it’s Rear Window, one of my favorite suspense films ever. Jimmy Stewart plays the part of a photographer stuck in his apartment for six weeks with a leg so broken they put him in a plaster cast that’s bigger than the Queen Mary. He lives in a studio apartment with a big window that overlooks a courtyard in the middle of his block and he can see into the windows of the apartments all around the courtyard. With all that spare time on his hands, he spends a lot of it watching his neighbors, and that’s how he sees the murder.

Except that Hitchcock never shows us the murder. In all the scenes of the apartment in question, he never even suggests it. Only the photographer does, and whenever he tries to convince somebody that something heinous is going on over there, he sounds like a stir-crazy lunatic, which Stewart plays with just the right touch of conspiracy-theorist zealotry.

In the end, the photographer draws his fiance and his nurse into his weird little voyeuristic fantasy and when they go ga-ga for it, they end up digging up flower beds and breaking into the apartment across the way. How could that go wrong? Meanwhile the photographer’s stuck in his apartment, powerless to do anything whenever there’s a close call.

What I most admire about the way this story’s plotted is that the whole murder mystery is entirely notional, living inside the photographer’s head, right up to the very end. There’s nothing to suggest it might have happened; we’re all just assuming he’s right and his neighbor’s a killer, until everything is rather brutally revealed.

Maybe the best detail in Rear Window is Thelma Ritter as the nurse. She all but steals the supporting actress role from Grace Kelly.