Tea at Trianon: Rear Window (1954)

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

Rear Window (1954)

From Anthony Esolen:

The murderer isn’t the focus of the movie. Those who are spying on him are. The setup is quite clever. L. B. Jeffries (James Stewart, in one of his two or three greatest performances) is a journalistic photographer by trade, whose work has taken him all over the world, into strange and dangerous places. But right now, after he broke his leg in a photo-shoot at a car race, he is laid up in his apartment in Greenwich Village. He has a nurse, Stella, who drops in every day (Thelma Ritter, at her best), a girl friend, Lisa, a high society girl who loves Jeff and wants to marry him (Grace Kelly, radiant as ever), a camera with a zoom lens, and a big wide rear window that looks out over a narrow courtyard into the windows of a dozen or so apartments opposite.
Since Jeff has nothing else to do all day, he’s taken to people-watching, guessing at the private lives of the various tenants he sees, and even giving them names, like poor “Miss Lonelyhearts,” who sometimes pretends to be having dinner with a male caller, as we see in pantomime, or the Newlyweds, the strains of whose first argument in their married life we hear over the distance. And then he sees Mr. Thorvald (Raymond Burr), a traveling salesman with an invalid wife who despises him, and we can hear the gruff and shrill back-and-forth of a man and a woman in bondage to hatred, jealousy, resentment, sorrow, and revenge.
The obvious question is one that we don’t ask at all. It has to be brought up indirectly, by the characters themselves. It is this: Why are we watching these people at all? Why should we pay any attention to what they are doing? Call it one of the worse reflexes of our fallen humanity. We are meant to be interested in other people. Isn’t that why we watch films in the first place, or read novels? “I’m a human being,” says Terence’s hero in the ancient Roman play The Self-Tormentor, “so I consider nothing human to be strange to me.” “I am involved in mankind,” says John Donne. But it’s one thing to get yourself wrapped up in the life of someone else. It’s another to do so uninvited. And it’s still another to do so, as a spy, interpreting someone else’s behavior in the worst light. It does happen that Thorvald is guilty. Does that let us off the hook? (Read more.)