Grace Kelly on TCM: REAR WINDOW, THE COUNTRY GIRL
James Stewart, Grace Kelly in Rear Window
Turner Classic Movies‘ Grace Kelly series continues this Thursday, Nov. 12, with three of Kelly’s biggest hits, all from 1954: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and The Country Girl. Kelly, who died in 1982 following a car accident in Monaco, would have turned 80 on Nov. 12.
Some consider Dial M for Murder a minor Alfred Hitchcock effort. Personally, I find it more enjoyable than Hitchcock’s revered Rear Window. Part of the reason is a pair of deadly scissors found in the former but not in the latter; yet, I’d say that the chief reason is that neither one of Kelly’s leading men in Dial M for Murder is James Stewart. Instead, she’s paired with Ray Milland — who wants her either dead or behind bars for life — and Robert Cummings.
Some consider Rear Window to be Hitchcock’s masterpiece. As so often happens, I disagree. Not that I have such a high regard for the other Hitchcock favorite, Vertigo; the fact is that the director’s films I like the most are usually (though not always) the ones that critics deride as mere studio productions, e.g., Rebecca, Lifeboat, Stage Fright — none of which features James Stewart making love to a good-looking blonde half his age.
Rear Window, in which a wheelchair-bound Stewart may or may not have seen a murder, is also studio fare — movie stars, a happy ending, a conventional narrative — though, admittedly, Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks, both of whom were nominated for Academy Awards, do use color creatively. Yet, bright reds or no, I find Rear Window neither very suspenseful nor very insightful. And not for a second could I believe that Grace Kelly and James Stewart were or might ever become a couple. Kelly would have fared better pairing up with either Wendell Corey or Thelma Ritter, who, as usual, steals the film from the nominal stars. (Come to think of it, Ritter got star billing in this one.)
”The wonderful thing about Grace," James Stewart later recalled, "was that she was just completely at ease with her lines. The emphasis was always in the right place, and this came from her. I remembered that very vividly … Absolutely fascinating woman. This was only her fifth picture.”
"Fascinating" is also the term New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther used to describe Kelly in his Rear Window review. As for the thriller itself, Crowther wrote, "Mr. Hitchcock’s film is not ’significant.’ What it has to say about people and human nature is superficial and glib. But it does expose many facets of the loneliness of city life and it tacitly demonstrates the impulse of morbid curiosity. The purpose of it is sensation, and that it generally provides in the colorfulness of its detail and in the flood of menace toward the end."
In The Country Girl (in a role originally offered to Jennifer Jones), Kelly is paired with Bing Crosby, playing an alcoholic has-been actor about to make a comeback, and William Holden, as the man who tries to rescue Crosby’s dipsomaniac. As Crosby’s frustrated wife, Grace Kelly won a best actress Oscar for consenting to wear shabby clothes and to appear in a black-and-white film. George Seaton directed and wrote the adaptation from Clifford Odets‘ play.
Kelly began her film career playing a bit part in a 1951 thriller. In the next two years, she was promoted to second leads. Thanks to Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and The Country Girl, by early 1955 Grace Kelly had become a Hollywood superstar.
Photo: Turner Classic Movies
Schedule and film synopses from the TCM website:
5:00pm Dial M For Murder (1954)
A straying husband frames his wife for the murder of the man he’d hired to kill her.
Cast: Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, Robert Cummings, John Williams Dir: Alfred Hitchcock C-105 mins7:00pm Rear Window (1954)
A photographer with a broken leg uncovers a murder while spying on the neighbors in a nearby apartment building.
Cast: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter Dir: Alfred Hitchcock C-114 mins9:00pm Country Girl, The (1954)
While trying to help her husband make a comeback, an alcoholic singer’s wife fights her love for another man.
Cast: Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, William Holden, Anthony Ross Dir: George Seaton BW-104 mins
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Tags: Alfred Hitchcock, Classic Movies, Dial M for Murder, George Seaton, Grace Kelly, James Stewart, Oscar 1954, Oscar Movies, Ray Milland, Rear Window, The Country Girl, Thelma Ritter, Turner Classic Movies
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