Of the millions of people who saw last year’s featherweight Shia LaBeouf suspense hit “Disturbia,” only a small number will ever realize that what they were viewing was essentially a remake — a fact which producer Steven Spielberg may eventually end up hearing about in court. Still, film fans should go straight to the source. Director D.J. Caruso’s teen trifle was a Big Mac – and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” is an adult-style full course steak dinner from the best restaurant you’ve ever been to.

Simultaneously a devilish entertainment and a big-hearted work of art, my personal all-time favorite film from one of the three or four best directors of all time is as funny as it is suspenseful to the point of being terrifying — while also managing to be sexy, romantic, and poignant. Both cinematically innovative and perfectly stylish, and with a witty and well-rounded script by John Michael Hayes, this masterpiece of mass entertainment is an abject lesson to makers of modern mainstream thrillers who act as if audiences are capable of precisely two emotions per film.

“Rear Window” stars James Stewart as L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies, an adrenaline junkie of a globetrotting photojournalist laid up in his Manhattan apartment with a broken leg. It’s 1955 and television is still a questionable new gadget that a busy guy like Jefferies wouldn’t bother with (and film studios would rather not advertise). Shia LaBouef’s beloved video games and Internet haven’t even been thought of, household air conditioning is about as common as 65-inch plasmas are today — and there is one of New York’s nasty, muggy heat waves to contend with. The heat turns out to be an extremely dangerous saving grace, because almost everyone in Jefferies’ apartment complex is keeping their windows wide open and providing what amounts to primitive reality television for the frustrated Jefferies. His entertainment choices include: sexy light comedy provided by the lithesome and often under-clad “Miss Torso” (Georgine Darcy); melodramatic pathos from the troubled “Miss Lonelyheart” (Judith Evelyn); and, the closest mid-‘50s equivalent to “Real Sex” — a mostly unseen honeymoon couple. Still, all of these diversions pale beside the apparent true crime tale concerning the unpleasant salesman (Raymond Burr) with an angry invalid wife, who, heralded only by the sound of a breaking glass and a stifled scream, suddenly disappears.

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