The View from Another ‘Rear Window’

There’s really no way to win when it comes to remaking an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Even if the results aren’t embarrassing, they’re still going to get compared to, well, Alfred Hitchcock. Gus Van Sant probably had the right idea with his Psycho remake. If you’re going to follow in Hitchcock’s footsteps, you may as well match him step for step. Still, that hasn’t stopped some from trying. John Buchan’s 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, for instance, has been adapted to film four times, but only Hitchcock’s 1935 version has endured in any meaningful way. There’s just no good reason to attempt a new and improved take on a Hitchcock film.

Most of the time, anyway. On November 22, 1998, ABC broadcast a TV movie version of Rear Window that—let’s just get this out of the way up front—is not nearly as good as Hitchcock’s original. It’s also pretty obvious that topping Hitchcock was never on the film’s to-do list. Co-written by Larry Gross (48. Hrs) and Eric Overmeyer (Homicide, The Wire) and directed by Jeff Bleckner (a journeyman who worked primarily in television), the 1998 Rear Window retrofits the original to convert it into a vehicle for star and executive producer Christopher Reeve, who’d been paralyzed from the neck down as the result of a 1995 equestrian accident. Rather than retreat from the spotlight after his injury, Reeve had been open about the extent of his injuries, the severity of his condition, the challenges he now faced on a day-by-day basis, and his hope to someday walk again. With Rear Window, he dramatized all of the above.

Reeve plays Jason Kemp, a successful New York architect who, in the film’s opening scene, is injured in a head-on collision when another driver who crosses the yellow line of a two-lane road while fumbling with her cell phone (which, in 1998, was still a somewhat novel cause for a motor accident). Jason suffers injuries identical to Reeve’s and loses a week of his memory, leaving him unsure at first about the cause of the accident until a detective named Charlie (Robert Forster) assures him the evidence confirms he was not at fault. (Jason will come to value this new acquaintance later in the film.)