Rear Window

Rear Window (1954) is Alfred Hitchcock's landmark mystery thriller — watch online on iFILM. James Stewart plays L.B. Jefferies, a photojournalist stuck in a wheelchair with a broken leg, and Grace Kelly plays his fiancée Lisa Fremont.

Jeff has one window onto the world: a courtyard ringed by apartments. He watches. A dancer, newlyweds, a lonely woman, a travelling salesman named Thorwald whose ailing wife suddenly disappears one night. Jeff keeps a mental log of every odd detail. The local detective dismisses it. So Lisa, dressed in Dior and carrying nothing but nerve, climbs across to search for proof herself.

Hitchcock built the entire Greenwich Village courtyard — twelve apartments, fire escapes, gardens — on a single Paramount soundstage and never left it. The result, released in August 1954, became one of the highest-grossing films of his career and a textbook example of how to build dread from a single fixed point of view. Screenwriter John Michael Hayes adapted Cornell Woolrich's short story; composer Franz Waxman's score drifts in from the neighbours' radios rather than an orchestra pit. Watch Rear Window online on iFILM.