The New Pictures

Rear Window (Paramount), just possibly the second most entertaining picture (after The 39 Steps) ever made by Alfred Hitchcock, is the movie equivalent of what boxing circles call "the handkerchief trick." The trick, as Philadelphia's Tommy Loughran used to play it, is simply to plant both feet on a standard-size pocket handkerchief, fold both hands behind the back, and fight a full three-minute round against a free-moving opponent without once taking the feet off the handkerchief.

In Rear Window, Director Hitchcock plants his camera on the esthetic handkerchief of a second-floor back room in Greenwich Village, to which a photographer (James Stewart )for one of the big picture magazines is confined with a broken leg. Inside the room the camera moves freely, but whenever it looks out the rear window, it is permitted to see only what the hero can see.

Drawn Blinds. The hero can see just about everything that goes on in the six or eight flats that rump into the same areaway as his, and Hitchcock, in a masterpiece of indirect exposition, lets the moviegoer play Peeping Tom until all at once he sees something that strikes him as--well, peculiar. That burly salesman in the second-floor flat of the modern apartment building, the one who so patiently nurses the complaining invalid wife--why does he make a number of trips out into the rain, one at 2 a.m., carrying his sample-suitcase? And why, all the next day, does he not go into the bedroom to see his wife? And why do the Venetian blinds in the bedroom stay drawn?

The photographer grabs his binoculars to take a closer look, hauls out his telephoto lens to get right down to fine points--such as a saw and a carving knife the salesman is meticulously wrapping in newspaper beside the kitchen sink.

By this time the moviegoer is about to drop his eyeballs out the window, and Hitchcock starts to tease. The photographer's girl friend (Grace Kelly), a high-fashion publicist, runs a pretty French seam of kisses down the Stewart profile; the ballerina in the lower-left corner of the camera's eye further cuts the sleuthing down to thighs; and the newlyweds in the third floor across the way keep threatening to dramatize every old joke about newlyweds. The beauty of it is that all Hitchcock's pandering is done with such wit and grace that the moviegoer may almost feel that Hitchcock is appealing to his better instincts.

There is, of course, a gory good finish, with Stewart standing off the murderer (Raymond Burr) with a barrage of popping flashbulbs, and somebody remarking that an important piece of evidence can be found in a hatbox. But the best of it is the moment in which Hitchcock dares to break his climax wide open to get a laugh --and gets away with it. When the New York cops run to the rescue, the film, just for an instant, runs in fast motion, producing a constabular celerity that has not been observed since the days of the Keystone Kops.

Junior-Executive Swagger. There is never an instant, in fact, when Director Hitchcock is not in minute and masterly control of his material: script, camera, cutting, props, the handsome set constructed from his ideas, the stars he has Hitched to his vehicle. Actor Stewart happily downplays his boyish charm, comes through strongly as Hitchcock's principal agent in creating suspense out of casual incident. Actress Kelly, a Hitchcock worker in Dial M for Murder and now working in his next picture, plays the career girl with a subtle junior-executive swagger, a good deal of wit, and a sort of U.H.F. sex that not everybody will be able to hear. As for Thelma Ritter, who plays a visiting nurse, she is probably the only actress alive who can stick a thermometer in a man's mouth and say, without a hint of affectation: "See if you can break a hundred."

So much to the good. To the bad are the occasional studied lapses of taste and, more important, the eerie sense a Hitchcock audience has of reacting in a manner so carefully foreseen as to seem practically foreordained. "It makes you want to fool him by reacting some other way," said another moviemaker, "but you can't. You're condemned to enjoyment."

Desires (Meteor-Fama; Grand Prize Films) is the first German film in several years that is worth the expense of its subtitles. It starts as a brisk thriller about a drug-addicted ballerina who pilfers her poison from an apothecary's safe. But soon the picture is twisting through some gothic involutions of motive, and it finishes in one of those duels of abstractions the Germans love and almost manage to make believable.

Threatened with legal action and financial ruin because of the missing morphine, the apothecary begs the ballerina to give it back. She refuses. A little later she had a heart attack, and the apothecary's wife, filling out a prescription of strychnine for the patient, has the perfect opportunity to do her in. While light and darkness moil and wrangle, the wife makes her inner decision.

The photography is first-class in a murkily introspective way, and the ballerina (Sybil Werden), the druggist (O. W. Fischer) and his wife (Heidemarie Hatheyer) are steadily excellent. There is some quiet kidding of second-string ballet companies, and a thrilling, light-splashed rush through the country in a carriage. But all too often the moviegoer is deafened by the tinkling symbols (e.g., spiders to signify evil thoughts, scales to balance vice and virtue) that clamor in the background.

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