Hitchcock's Stars by Lesley L. Coffin

Author:Lesley L. Coffin [Coffin, Lesley L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Grace Kelly emerged as a Hollywood icon with her role as Lisa in Rear Window (1954). Paramount Pictures/Photofest © Paramount Pictures

Critics, while they liked Stewart and were impressed that he conveys as much as he does from the limitations of a wheelchair, gave Kelly the most praise, delighted by the way the embodiment of the polished woman joins in the spy games, keeping her beautiful looks and temperament intact while climbing fences and sneaking into Raymond Burr’s home in an attempt to win favor from her love. Hitchcock himself described it as the height of her career as an actress, stating, “Grace hadn’t achieved the final—not in my book. She was just getting started. She showed potential in Dial M for Murder but Rear Window was the first picture that really brought her out. She had just begun to get somewhere when she quit.”2 As Lisa, Grace Kelly found a character that suggested the beauty was exterior to the “Girl Friday”: a funny, cheeky girl willing to be on a man’s arm but always one step ahead. The simple wave she gives while breaking into Burr’s apartment makes Stewart smile for the same reason it makes the audience smile. We don’t expect a woman of Kelly’s refinement to be so daring.

While tonally different, playing more like a sophisticated romantic comedy than drama, there are similarities between Rear Window and Notorious: the pleasure Hitchcock gives to his audience by presenting a regular, approachable, but deeply flawed, character played by Jimmy Stewart, with Kelly who projected almost an ethereal quality in her films. Hitchcock understood that in order to allow audiences to share in the delight of a romance on-screen, there had to be a relatable character to represent the audience, as well as the fantasy to represent movie magic. Like Notorious, in which natural Bergman is consumed by her romance with Hollywood’s most wanted man, Cary Grant, in Rear Window everyman Stewart lives out the desires of those in the audience: not only to have a relationship with Lisa, but to be aggressively pursued by the great beauty and ultimately be the chivalrous hero.

There was, however, a major difference between the two fantasies Hitchcock offered his audiences. Cary Grant’s persona was years in the making, long before he appeared in a Hitchcock film, and while Hitchcock utilized this image, it was one Grant brought to his films with Hitchcock, and more importantly, one he owned away from Hitchcock and brought to every “Cary Grant movie.” Kelly’s persona was so closely tied to her relationship with Hitchcock; although she would use the new image in non-Hitchcock films, the star known as Grace Kelly seemed to exist in a vacuum. Her television and early film work became disconnected from this glamorous new image as the embodiment of “grace” and sophistication in the last days of Hollywood glamour. Ironically, Kelly’s last film for Hitchcock, To Catch a Thief, would add an independent spirit to the image of Grace Kelly—and hint at the changes coming to Hollywood.

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