Vertigo is a psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The film stars Jimmy Stewart as a former police detective John “Scottie” Ferguson, who has been forced into early retirement due to his discovery of crippling acrophobia and vertigo. Scottie is hired as a private investigator to follow a woman, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) who is behaving peculiarly. The film received mixed reviews upon initial release, but has garnered acclaim since and is now often cited as one of the defining works of his career. It is currently listed at #65 on the IMDb Top 250, which I think is a travesty. It shows you what type of list the IMDb Top 250 is, to see this film and others, like Citizen Kane, outside of the top 50, but The Dark Knight currently holds the #4 place. But in the 2012 British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound critics’ poll, it replaced Citizen Kane as the best film of all time and has appeared repeatedly in best film polls by the American Film Institute.

I have to confess. This is one of those movies that you hear about and want to watch because others say it is so good. I’ve had it on my watch-list for years. This was one of the many Alfred Hitchcock films that my parents owned. But for some reason, unlike North by Northwest or The Birds or Psycho, I just never got around to watching this one. But I finally tackled this one on Saturday last year and have been digesting it ever since. This draft has literally been sitting in my project pile since March 2013 and if WordPress is correct in its count, I have made 67 different revisions in that time. Well, I finally watched it again tonight with the purpose of finishing what I started.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b69YGZizcKc

Ebert’s Great Movies Review from 1996

*** SPOILER ALERT *** Because of the nature of this film, I must warn anyone who reads further on that the rest of this review will contain spoilers. Please take the time to watch this classic before reading any more. *** SPOILER ALERT ***

In the film, James Stewart (an actor whose squeaky clean image Hitchcock did his best to destroy in his movies) plays a former police detective whose fear of heights causes the death of another officer. At least, that’s what he thinks. As such, Stewart is predisposed to feelings of immense gilt from the beginning of this film. And this guilt is compacted when he falls in love with the wife of an old friend. She soon dies, as well, and Stewart falls into despair.

He soon finds an opportunity to alleviate his guilt in the form of a young woman who eerily resembles the dead wife. Grief and guilt are strong motivators. They can make a person desperate to return to the past; to imagine a world where certain bad things never happened, then try their hardest to make that world a reality. Stewart befriends this young woman, systematically turning her into his dead love. His obsession is abusive and we the audience are deeply disturbed and confused.

Why is he doing this? Where is this leading? The answer presents itself soon enough, and it is an answer we don’t like. Obsession seldom ends well, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo is no exception. There are no easy answers as to why a person can latch on to a certain notion or feeling and never let go. One can only look at that person with scorn and pity as their insane story plays itself out. Hitchcock, a man who didn’t like his movies to be too messy, was nonetheless smart enough to realize that to make a neat-and-tidy film about guilt and obsession would be to do a disservice to the subject. There are aspects of life that are scary and confusing and mournful; to adequately make a film about them means being open to psychological chaos.

Vertigo is a film that is hard to summarize. However, at no point does it feel like Hitchcock is screwing with you just to screw with you. This is an elusive subject, and should be regarded as such. When I was young, I shied away from movies that I didn’t fully understand.  Now, as I’ve gotten older, I embrace them.  I may not completely comprehend them, but who says I have to?  There are no easy answers in life, so why should there be in film?

There are only a handful of films that I have a hard time getting an analytical handle on, but still love all the same. The fact is, there are just some movies out there that buck against your desire to interpret them. Once you think you’ve got them all figured out, you see something different that completely obliterates your previous thought or adds another layer that you haven’t previously discovered. As strange as it may sound, talking about these films is like trying to grab the wind. The harder you try to harness it, the more frustrated you’ll become. It’s bigger than you; you’ll never be able to hold onto it. Instead, it’s better to simply let yourself feel it and experience it, making peace with the fact that it will never belong to you.

All that is very abstract, I know, but such is the nature of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.  This is a brilliant film and I’m not sure even Hitchcock himself fully understood the film that he created. It received minimal praise from viewers and critics alike. This commercial and critical indifference was a bitter pill for him swallow, and he would later go on record as blaming both of his leads for its perceived failings. He said that Stewart was too old at 49 to play a romantic lead opposite the 24-year-old Novak who, he felt, was miscast in the role of Madeleine. Stewart, with whom Hitchcock had collaborated on a number of pictures during the 1950s, was never again cast in a Hitchcock film. But despite its initial commercial failure, Hitchcock came to consider it one of his favorite films. I think Screenwriter Samuel Taylor got it right when he noted how important and personal a project this was for Hitchcock. “We could all feel that this was a very important project for Hitch and that he was feeling this story very deeply, very personally.” After all, the core of the film’s plot (the obsessive control wielded by one man over a woman) was and later would be reflected in the real-life working relationships that Hitchcock had with his leading ladies such as Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, and Janet Leigh.

There is something especially strange about the idea of Alfred Hitchcock making a movie so psychologically complicated as Vertigo. Hitchcock may have been a director who liked to explore the darker complexities of the human mind, but his films could often feel very cold and clinical. He was a director whose work I love and respect, but you always knew what you were going to get. He could thrill you and shock you, but he very rarely challenged you. Psycho may have killed the main character in the first forty minutes, but it also gave you a clean and simple explanation of Norman Bates’ psychosis at the end of the film. Vertigo doesn’t give us that.

Hitchcock was a filmmaker who was drawn toward the theme of human obsession. This was the first (and possibly only) time that Hitchcock truly embraced the confusion, moral ambiguity, and messiness associated with obsession. And I see a great parallel to the book of Ecclesiastes in this film as Scottie goes deeper into his obsession seeking a satisfaction that continues to elude him. He believes that happiness lies in recreating his past however the past is a fickle muse and in the end we are left to see that all his efforts are just a running after the wind. I plan to write about this more with a full analysis of the film, however this is supposed to be a simple review.

Simply put, now approaching 60 years old, Vertigo stands up as an enthralling movie, a magnificent convergence of directing, story, theme and performance. Both Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak were never better than in their portrayals of Scotty and Judy. And Hitchcock’s performance as director is virtuoso. The movie is littered with clues, hints and meanings. They’re suggested by what he has the camera do, how the sets are designed and how he uses them, by the lighting and through Bernard Herrmann’s score. It’s an incredible orchestration of all the elements of film and what a great movie should be: endlessly rewarding with all it offers up with each viewing.