It's easy to fall in love with Grace Kelly in Hitchcock's masterpiece, Rear Window. After all, she is Grace Kelly but maybe even more with her character Lisa Fremont, a woman who brings you dinner from 21 right before she helps you spy on an possible axe murderer.

Lisa may be the perfect girlfriend, even though L.B. Jeffries, Jimmy Stewart, can't see it. L.B., laid up with a broken leg, is too obsessed with peeking through shades and looking down the long camera lens to notice.

We all know the story of how Hitchock made Lisa, L.B., and most of all, the audience, voyeurs in that small Greenwich Village apartment building. The camera rarely leaves the perch of L.B.'s apartment, keeping track of the suicidal spinster, Miss Lonely Hearts, the worn-out newleyweds, a gorgeous dancer, Miss Torso, and a man who seems to have misplaced his nagging, bedridden wife.

One of the great film experience I've had was watching the film for the hundredth time at the old Tampa Theatre for its 50th Anniversary release with my girlfriend and now wife. The relationships in the movie are timeless: a man and a woman, a man and his physical therapist, and, of course, a man and his crazed neighborhood killer.

To see the film in a theater was to make you a resident of Hitch's world.

That same restored version of the film is being shown tonight on TCM at 10. Like any other great work, you pick up something new with every viewing.

The film had a tremendous impact on me as I wrote White Shadow. In fact, I named my narrator L.B. in honor of the film and in a large extent based the character of Eleanor Charles on Grace Kelly.

Over the years, critics have discussed much about the voyeur nature of the filmgoer and how we're all accomplices to L.B. and Lisa. And now in the age of facebook, twitter and the like, Thelma Ritter's terrific line holds up stronger than ever: "We've become a race of peeping toms."

And tonight, as whenever Rear Window plays, I'll be watching.