One of the most painful things Hitchcock shows us is the home life of Thorvald (Raymond Burr), the salesman Jeff comes to suspect of murder. A fat, rumpled man, Thorvald isn't attractive or agreeable. He's brusque and rude during his one interchange with a neighbor, and his life looks to be hell. His invalid wife, who appears to be a hypochondriac, begins berating him as soon as he walks through the door. When he attempts to be tender to her by placing a fresh-cut flower from his lovingly tended flower bed on her dinner tray, she laughs at him and tosses it away. And, having made this suspected murderer pitiable, Hitchcock goes even further, employing his traditional method of supplying the audience with information that his characters don't possess, but with a twist: This bit of information would seem to suggest that no crime took place. In the scene where Thorvald confronts Jeff, both of their faces remain in darkness. It's as if a character has walked out of a movie to demand an accounting from the person who has turned his life into entertainment.

The screenplay by John Michael Hayes (from the Cornell Woolrich story "It Had to Be Murder") lapses from time to time into awkward topic sentences. At one point, Stella declares, "We've become a race of peeping toms." But it isn't peeping that's on trial here as much as the propensity of human beings to detach themselves from one another. The backyard world of "Rear Window" isn't a neighborhood -- merely a collection of people living in close proximity. The neighbors barely speak to one another. Jeff's voyeurism is simply the most extreme form of that detachment. Hitchcock brings that to the fore in an excruciating sequence where Jeff and Lisa and Stella are so intrigued by what's going on in Thorvald's apartment that, despite the urgent evidence in front of their eyes, they nearly allow a woman to commit suicide. And Hitchcock ups the ante just a few minutes later when Jeff almost allows Lisa to be killed as he watches, acting as if he were a man watching a movie instead of a person with the power to prevent a murder.

Has any nice-guy actor so beloved of audiences ever allowed himself to be as unlikable as Stewart was in the films he made with Hitchcock? It's a tribute to them both that the most extreme character he played for the director, the obsessed detective in "Vertigo," is also the most sympathetic. But as the domineering doctor bullying his wife into giving up her career in "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956) and in "Rear Window," Stewart shows no qualms about playing a heel.

Stewart remains seated in a wheelchair for the whole movie; his lankiness seems to have metamorphosed into a collection of jagged edges and prickles. Jeff is short-tempered and sharp-tongued. Just as Hitchcock subverts our desire to play sleuth in "Rear Window," he also subverts the masculine view of marriage as a trap to lure men into a world of frivolity and softness. Jeff protests that he's not suited to Lisa's Park Avenue world and that she couldn't adapt to tagging along on his assignments and living rough. It's a familiar argument, one that's been traditionally used to trivialize women. Except that having established Jeff as something of a thrill junkie, Hitchcock makes it seem the protestations of someone unwilling to give up an adolescent world of boys' book adventure and become an adult. Lisa is the one who acts like an adult here, who tries to strike a compromise he won't even consider.

If "Rear Window" has a soul, it's Grace Kelly. So much has been written about her as Hitchcock's quintessential ice-cold blond, but she's the warmest and most likable character here. Yes, Kelly is a joy to look at (especially dressed in what are probably the most chic, beautiful outfits Edith Head ever designed) and she parries Jeff's objections with admirable, economical wit and pin-neat timing. But everything about Kelly's performance, and about the way Hitchcock presents Lisa to us, mitigates against the idea of the rich girl rendered untouchable by her money and style and manners.

Instead of using Jeff's ridicule to score points off of Lisa as a silly society airhead (which is how she would be presented by Hitchcock in "To Catch a Thief"), time and again he shows us how much that ridicule hurts her. And where Jeff brushes aside her suggestion that she's not beyond ending up like Miss Lonelyhearts, Hitchcock, in one breathtaking and wholly unexpected shot, raises just that possibility. Just as Hitchcock has invited us to enjoy a thriller only to disrupt our expectations, he invites us to enjoy Grace Kelly as the essence of the unruffled sophistication the movies have taught us to cherish, only to suggest a lurking despair.

It doesn't do away with any of the ambiguities that Hitchcock raises in "Rear Window" that Jeff turns out to be right. The worlds we have looked into are still private ones, the moments he has turned to for amusement are often too raw to be amusing to anyone but the wholly callous. Standing in for all the people who have been watched, Thorvald asks Jeff a question he is unable to answer, the unsolved mystery that hangs over "Rear Window" and the one that we may be no more able to answer: "What do you want from me?"

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