Hollywood Gamechangers Part 2/3: Rear Window (1954)

Award-winning author and documentarian Steven C. Smith takes us inside the battles and breakthroughs behind three screen classics. All of them defied the rules…advanced the art of filmmaking…and remain among the most entertaining movies ever made.
Steven C. Smith is an award-winning biographer, four-time Emmy-nominated producer, and 16-time Telly Award winner. His over-200 documentaries include collaborations with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Julie Andrews, Stephen Sondheim, Harrison Ford and Sidney Poitier.
REAR WINDOW (1954)
Voyeurism. Sex. Murder. Director Alfred Hitchcock combined his favorite ingredients in the blockbuster that kicked off his greatest, and most lucrative, period. James Stewart stars as a pro photographer who, when stuck in his Greenwich Village apartment with his leg in a cast, starts spying-er, studying-his neighbors across the way…and realizes that one of them is a murderer.
Working as his own producer after years as a director-for-hire, Hitchcock began to amass a multi-million-dollar fortune with this film. Also sharing the profits was James Stewart, one of the first actors to share in a movie’s gross take, and to own a percentage of the movie. Stewart’s sexy onscreen dialogue with Grace Kelly, at her most luminous, also pushed the envelope with censors. The result remains one of the wittiest, most suspenseful thrillers ever made.