Release Year: 1954

Genre: Mystery, Thriller

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writers: John Michael Hayes, Cornell Woolrich (short story)

Stars: Grace Kelly, James Stewart

An Xfinity Triple Play subscription, maybe a Netflix or Hulu account, and all of this trouble could have been avoided. L.B. Jefferies could've spent his convalescence catching up on Survivor and Duck Dynasty episodes and binge-watching some MMA instructional videos and ugly-dog contests, and he wouldn't have had to kill time spying on his neighbors. Scratching his voyeuristic itch would have been as easy as KUWTK—um, we mean ABC.

Fortunately for us, there wasn't much else to do in 1954 after you'd watched The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and The Ed Sullivan Show. Otherwise, we wouldn't have Alfred Hitchcock's suspense masterpiece, Rear Window. Released in 1954, the film draws us in as co-conspirators as Jefferies (you can call him Jeff), confined to a wheelchair in his apartment with a badly broken leg and a plaster cast up to here, gets morbidly obsessed with eavesdropping on his neighbors around his courtyard … and becomes convinced that one of them has murdered his wife.

Rear Window is one of the best from the Master of Suspense. We're talking one of cinema's greatest directors at the top of his game with the kind of story that he was born to tell. A huge box-office hit, the film scooped up four Oscar noms (no wins) and is #48 on the American Film Institute's latest list of 100 Greatest American Films of All Time. A simple structure, an uncomplicated narrative, and a single setting (Jeff's living room) somehow add up to a masterpiece.

But Rear Window wasn't important just for its brilliant camera techniques and its ability to create a thriller out of one man's very limited POV. It also exploded the barrier between the audience and the object of its gaze. The film begins as the blinds in Jeff's apartment are raised and he begins to look out his window. Stuck in our seats as firmly as Jeff, we're witness only to what he sees; the plot unfolds for us along with him. And as we see plenty of things that are none of our business, we feel a little guilty.

Long before voyeurism—in the form of reality TV—became the national pastime, Rear Window predicted that it could.

Rear Window finds Hitchcock hitting his stride, in full command of his visual storytelling. From a technical standpoint, the movie is almost perfect: well paced; exciting; full of sharp, clever dialogue; and with a great murder mystery as a hook and two of the biggest stars of Hollywood's Golden Age knocking it out of the park.

If straight-up entertainment is your thing, Rear Window is a great way to spend your evening.

But beyond that, the film dives deeply into ideas that are almost more relevant today than they were in 1954—ideas about being watched and judged.

To be fair, it's no coincidence that the film was made during the height of the Joseph McCarthy and House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings when Americans, including many Hollywood actors and directors, were being subjected to a witch-hunt aimed at ferreting out alleged Communists in the industry. People were asked to testify against each other and, as they say, "name names." Those suspected of being Communist sympathizers were blacklisted and not allowed to work in film. Everyone had the feeling of being watched, and Hitch knew how destructive it could be.

Today, Rear Window taps into our morbid curiosity about the lives of other people. And we don't even need binoculars like Jeff did. We can do it on our TVs and phones, assured that nothing we watch can ever come back to bite us. Every time we turn on that computer—you know, the one you're sitting in front of right now—or TV, we can see people ready to show us everything, and we love watching them do their thing. We can safely make assumptions and judgments about them and enjoy the spectacle of watching their lives fall apart around them without feeling like any of it can touch us.

Of course, that safety is just a fantasy. We love to watch and eavesdrop until we're the ones being watched or eavesdropped upon, and suddenly what feels like harmless fun turns into something not so fun.

Rear Window explores all of this decades before anyone had even dreamed of the Internet or reality television or People magazine or Edward Snowden. But it's more relevant than ever: It asks why we need that voyeurism in our lives. Why do we like peeping across that backyard fence, real or electronic? What drives that curiosity about other people, only to resent the way they look at us? Are we really a community that cares about our neighbors, or are we just a world full of judgmental busybodies?

Rear Window asks all of those questions, and it aims its sharpest barbs at us, the moviegoers: as big a pack of privileged voyeurs as you're likely to find. In Rear Window, we're snooping on the neighbors right along with Jeff.

Ask yourself—would you have put down the binoculars?