It may be the softest kiss in film history. The sun is setting over West Side rooftops, the sky persimmon. A man, his leg in a cast, sleeps near an open window, undisturbed by a neighbor singing scales. We see a face: blue eyes, red lips, skin like poured cream, pearls. Then he sees it. The kiss happens in profile, a slow-motion hallucinatory blur somewhere between myth and dream, a limbic level of consciousness.
The director, Alfred Hitchcock, liked to say he got the effect by shaking the camera. In truth, this otherworldly kiss comes to us by way of a double printing. Has any muse in cinema been graced with such a perfect cameo portrait of her power?
Another soft kiss, more teasing questions. Who, indeed! In , when Rear Window premiered, Grace Kelly had been in only four films. She was hardly known to the public, and then she was suddenly knownβa star. In her first film, Fourteen Hours, she played an innocent bystander, on-screen for two minutes and 14 seconds. It was a steep and impressive learning curve, straight to the top.
By the time Hitchcock got his hands on her, figuratively speaking, casting himself as Pygmalion to her Galatea, Grace Kelly was ready for her close-up. Hitchcock gave her one after another, in three films that placed her on a pedestalβ Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief βenshrining her as an archetype newly minted. She was ladylike yet elemental, suggestive of icy Olympian heights and untouched autonomy yet, beneath it all, unblushing heat and fire.
By , two years, six films, and one Academy Award after Rear Window βwhile the country was still wondering, Who are you, Miss Kelly?
