With all due respect to films like Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, and North By Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock’s best movie is the Jimmy Stewart thriller Rear Window. In this taut little drama, Stewart plays a photographer who was injured in a car crash and is stuck in a wheelchair while he recovers. Unable to leave his apartment, he takes to observing the activities of his neighbors through the windows as a sort of perverse entertainment – entertainment that takes a chilling turn when he thinks he sees one of his neighbors commit murder.
Sure, there are some elements that are kind of icky – Stewart is literally spying on his neighbors for most of the film, which isn’t exactly kosher. And how anyone could be so interested in what’s going on across the way when your girlfriend is Grace Kelly and she’s at your house every fifteen minutes seems almost beyond belief. But hey, it’s a movie. Suspension of disbelief is a thing. The thing that makes Rear Window so great is that virtually the entire film takes place in a single room, and despite that, Hitchcock is able to amplify the tension even more than when he had Cary Grant dangling from Mount Rushmore five years later. A single-room thriller is very difficult to pull off, but he did it TWICE, both in this masterpiece and in the underrated Rope.
The reason I’m talking about Rear Window today, though, is not because I’m going to give you a list of confined space thrillers worth watching (Wait Until Dark, Phone Booth, Buried – that’s enough of a list to get started), but because I noticed a few days ago that this year marks the 70th anniversary of the film and, lo and behold, Fathom Events is holding a nationwide anniversary screening on August 25. This, of course, is a date of monumental significance because it also happens to be the birthdate of several notable figures, namely Sean Connery, Tim Burton, Regis Philbin, Billy Ray Cyrus, and myself. (Incidentally, if this doesn’t completely disprove astrology once and for all, I don’t know what will.) Anyway, whilst I’m sure I’ll be occupied with the customary parades, speeches, and address to the nation, the idea of seeing my favorite Hitchcock movie on my birthday IN A MOVIE THEATER is enticing as hell.
Not long ago, I saw a Facebook conversation in which one person expressed an interest in an upcoming screening of Shrek at his local theater, and somebody else began to chastise him for buying a ticket to watch a movie he can watch at home for free. This is an all too common attitude, of course, especially with younger audiences. I know I’m about to sound like a curmudgeonly old man (because I, like Tim Burton and Billy Ray and our fellow August 25th baby Claudia Schiffer, AM a curmudgeonly old man). My high school students are perfectly happy watching everything on their phone screen. Of course, they’re also incapable of paying attention to anything longer than 37 seconds in length, which I assume is the maximum amount of time you can spend watching a film intended to be projected onto a 70-foot screen on a device smaller than a slice of bread. I wholeheartedly believe that a screen as small as a smartphone is a terrible way to watch any sort of longform entertainment and that is part of the reason that younger generations have such an abysmal attention span and, furthermore, I would like to invite you all to get the hell off my lawn.
That aside, though, the larger question seems to be why one would pay for movie theater prices to see a movie that you’ve already seen. That, at least, is an argument I can comprehend. My answer to that, though, is that I’m not lining up to rewatch Mac and Me, I want to see Rear Freaking Window. As I wrote last year, I sincerely believe that every movie is more enjoyable if viewed in a theater with a receptive and enthusiastic audience. That’s true whether I’ve seen a movie five thousand times or zero times (and, truth be told, I bet that watching Mac and Me could actually be a hoot if you have the right people in the theater with you).
Having the proper audience is important, of course. With new movies, this is a crapshoot – the studios tend to make every movie look as homogenous as possible to draw in every quadrant, and nobody knows for sure if what they’re going to watch is any good or not. I always HOPE a movie is going to be good, of course. I don’t understand “hatewatching.” I can honestly say I’ve never walked into a movie theater WISHING for a movie that disappoints me. But when it’s a movie that no one has ever seen before, you’re rolling the dice.
That said, the right audience is essential. My wife Erin and I saw this firsthand when RiffTrax did their live theater screening of the Doctor Who serial, The Five Doctors. RiffTrax, if you don’t know, is put on by classic cast members of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and they carry on the mission of cracking jokes at movies. It’s a blast, if you’re a fan.
IF you’re a fan.
When we arrived at the theater, we encountered a couple wearing heavy Who regalia who were very excited about a theatrical screening of the legendary story. They took a seat behind us and began to excitedly chatter…but in that chatter, it became quite obvious to Erin and I that while these two were major fans of Doctor Who, they didn’t seem to know WHAT RIFFTRAX IS. As the presentation started, the riffers launched into a short film about safety around electrical wires, cracking their usual jokes about the absurdity of the film, and I heard the man behind us tell his wife, “I hope they don’t do this during the whole movie.”
I turned into that emoji with the clenched teeth. 😬
They lasted about 15 minutes into the Doctor Who serial and left, clearly irritated at the irreverence with which their beloved Doctor was being treated. And I felt bad for them, because they obviously didn’t know what they were getting into…but once they were gone, the rest of us had a grand old time.
It’s about being with the right crowd. One of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater was when the Star Trek documentary Trekkies was released back in 1997. The film is a glimpse into the lives of Trek fans from across the country, a particularly niche subject matter, and it didn’t get a wide release. However, someone I knew happened to have a connection at the local UPN affiliate (home of Star Trek: Voyager) and scored some free passes to a screening they were hosting. The result was an entire theater full of people who LOVED STAR TREK, and there is no better atmosphere in which to watch this movie. We laughed at the people who went a little too far. We cracked jokes about the woman who dressed up her poodle as Spock. And we collectively shed a tear when James Doohan shared the beautiful (and now oft-told) story of how his connection with a fan saved them from committing suicide.
That “right crowd” mindset works very well when going to see a classic movie in the theater. Odds are, the majority of the audience HAS seen the movie before and is excited to see it with a crowd, and those that HAVEN’T seen it before are there because they want to join in the fun. It’s the reason that interactive screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show have endured for such a long time. To give another example: Erin’s favorite movie is Jaws, and as it was released before either of us were born (we’re old, but we ain’t THAT old), when a special screening was announced at a Movie Tavern within an hour’s driving distance, we decided to make it a date night. (It goes without saying that this was before Eddie was born, although Erin was pregnant at the time.) Near us sat a father with his daughter, who I guessed was about 13 years old and who clearly had never seen the movie before. She was doing fine right up until the scene where Richard Dreyfuss finds Ben Gardner’s decapitated head drifting in the shipwreck underwater, at which point she jumped into her dad’s lap and stayed there for the rest of the movie. It was amazing.
After Gene Wilder died, there were special screenings of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Blazing Saddles, and we did a double feature. Saddles is – and I say this with firm conviction and damn the mobs who want to piss on everything older than 2008 – one of the funniest movies ever made, and seeing it for the first time in a theater was fun. But Wonka was downright magical. The screening was full of parents with kids, many of whom had never seen the movie before. Those kids were mesmerized, drawn into the magic and swept up in this 50-year-old film in a way that the 15-year-old remake by my birthday buddy Burton couldn’t hope to match.
And you know, I don’t think those kids would care if they HAD seen the movie before. Seeing it on the screen is DIFFERENT. It’s only adults that are too stupid to push that aside. If my son can watch the same YouTube video of the 2017 Times Square New Year’s Eve ball drop 47 times in a row, he sure as hell isn’t going to walk into a screening of Despicable Me and say, “Daddy, I’ve seen this before.”
When I was a kid, Disney used to frequently re-release their classic movies. I got to see films from decades before I was born like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and The Sword in the Stone. With the exception of one-night or short-term engagements, that doesn’t happen anymore (possibly because Disney is afraid people will remember how much better the original versions of these movies are than the lifeless remakes they’re turning out lately). But damn it, it should. My family doesn’t get to the movies much these days, but if I was at a movie theater right now and given a choice between seeing Fast and Furious 11 for the first time or watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the twentieth time (but the first time in a theater), it wouldn’t even be close.
With movie theater attendance struggling, there’s a desperate effort to create content that fills seats, but I feel like theaters are missing out on an obvious opportunity here. Doing a revival screening of Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz may not sell as many tickets as a Marvel movie, but it also costs a hell of a lot less to put back into theaters. Give us more classic family movies! Give us more events! When the Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy hit theaters in the 90s, we fans came out in FORCE (pun intended), not because we wanted to see Greedo shoot first, but because we wanted to see him in a room the size of a house and full of other people who loved the movie as much as we did.
These screenings DO happen. Like I said, Fathom Events does anniversary and event screenings a lot. There was the aforementioned Gene Wilder double feature. And Disney just announced an all-day nine movie marathon of the Star Wars films on May 4th. But I don’t want to have to wait for an anniversary that ends in a 5 or 0 or for somebody to die before I get to see a classic.
I wish there were a nearby, easily-accessible theater in my area that frequently did revivals or special screenings of classics, but alas, there aren’t a ton of options, especially if you don’t have a lot of opportunities to go into New Orleans proper. So I keep an eye on Fathom events and I cross my fingers for special screenings and I long for the day when the cinematic community figures out how to make this happen.
And I hope to see Hitch’s cameo the way it was meant to be seen: big enough to fall into his nostrils.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. If anyone is available to babysit on August 25, let him know.
Blake M. Petit 