Rear Window (1954)

Seeing the sumptuously restored version of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 suspense classic, "Rear Window," has been a powerful lesson for me in just how much you miss of a great movie when you only see it on video, or on a less-than-perfect print.

The film is, of course, a staggering masterpiece: one of the most elegant entertainments ever made in Hollywood, and also one of the boldest and most personal of the Hitchcock films -- a work that's almost perverse in its giddy celebration of the thrill of voyeurism.

I've seen it at least a half-dozen times, and watched it on video just last August in preparation for writing about the 100th anniversary of the master's birth. And since it takes place on a single set, it always has seemed to me to be a film that doesn't really require the scope of the big screen.

But previewing this latest reissue was, as the cliché goes, like viewing "Rear Window" for the first time. And the experience begins from the cheeky opening, when we see that the Paramount mountain logo (missing from all versions since the '50s) has been returned to the bamboo shades of the hero's apartment.