Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from: 

Rear Window (1954)

Stella: You know, I should have been a gypsy fortune-teller instead of an insurance company nurse. I got a nose for trouble. Can smell it ten miles away. You heard of that market crash in "29? I predicted that. 

LB: Just how did you do that, Stella? 

 Stella: Oh, simple. I was nursing a director of General Motors. "Kidney ailment," they said. "Nerves," I said. Then I asked myself, 'What's General Motors got to be nervous about?" "Overproduction," I says. "Collapse." When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country's ready to let go. 

LB: You know, Stella, in economics, a kidney ailment has no relationship to the stock market. None whatsoever. 

 Stella: Crashed, didn't it? 

One day I'll have transcribed every single line of dialogue that Thelma Ritter says in Rear Window for this series - that's just how integral to living I find her character's homespun wisdom, as she calls it. I rewatched Rear Window last night for the dozenth upon dozenth squared time, and I really need to shut my yap about it being replaced as my favorite movie ever until after I rewatch it because I'm immediately swayed back to its favor once I do. 

Did you know that Rear Window is apparently one hundred and twelve minutes long? That is just shy of two hours, and you could've fooled me because once again it was the scene where Raymond Burr's throwing Jimmy Stewart out the window before I realized any time had passed at all. 

Something new always strikes me every time I watch the movie - last night it was Lisa (Grace Kelly) admitting her dress cost 1100 dollars. 1100 dollars! That translates to that dress costing just under ten thousand dollars now. And she just lounges around in it in his dingy apartment like it's no big whoop. Hitch and screenwriter John Michael Hayes did a smart thing though - they have her repeatedly talk about how she's given the clothes and didn't spend that much money on them herself. It'd be harder to like Lisa otherwise, even though nobody wants their Grace Kelly wearing anything less.

.