“The most unusual and intimate journey into human emotions ever filmed” is the tag line for the Paramount’s 1962 rerelease (in VistaVision) of Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated 1954 thriller Rear Window (from an original story by noir mystery writer Cornell Woolrich). Although critics do not usually include this film in the noir category, its theme—voyeurism—and the darkness of the minds of its protagonists, despite the clarity of its photography and color in VistaVision, qualify it as a “noir classic.” Rear Window has a very simple story: L. B. Jeffries (played by veteran Hitchcock actor James Stewart), a top action photographer, is confined to his Greenwich Village apartment because of an accident that has left him in a leg cast.

To amuse himself between visits from his nurse, Stella (played by Thelma Ritter), Jeffries gazes out the rear window at the opposite buildings. Thanks to a high-powered lens attached to his very expensive camera, he takes pictures of his neighbors, who almost never have the shades down, day or evening. He even gives them names: Miss Torso, a ballet dancer (Georgine Darcy) who is always practicing her art to the strains of Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town; a songwriter (Ross Bagdasarian) who is composing the song “Lisa” (Franz Waxman’s song for Grace Kelly, the film’s female star) and always giving parties; “Miss Lonelyhearts” (Judith Evelyn), who sets an extra place at her candlelit dinner table, then dines alone; and the Thorwalds (Raymond Burr and Irene

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