Vertigo
(1958)
Rated: PG
Runtime: 2 Hours and 9 Minutes
Reviewer: Dale
Grade: A+What can I say about Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" that has not already been said. Like many other have already said: it's brilliant. It's daring, more daring perhaps than anything else Hitch ever did. And it is immensely compelling. I was hooked by the film before I even knew it and I was hooked until the shocking, and remarkably disturbing ending.
Jimmy Stewart (frequent Hitchcock collaborator and kickass actor extraordinaire) stars as Scottie. As the film begins, Scottie is a member of the San Francisco police. One night he is chasing a suspect over rooftops. He slips and is left dangling from a rain gutter. Another officer stops to lend him a hand...and goes careening off into the night while Jimmy watches, helpless.
It turns out that Scottie is acrophobic (and he couldn't have discovered this at a worse possible time) which means that whenever he gets somewhere high, he experiences a feeling of vertigo, or dizziness. So he decides to quit the police force and get into a tamer line of work...though he can't figure out what that might be.
Soon, an old college friend asks Scottie to tail his wife, who has been acting rather strange lately. Scottie pursues her and, indeed, she is acting peculiar. She sits at the park by the Golden Gate bridge for hours on end, staring into the bay. She sits in front of a painting of a woman named Carlotta who looks suspiciously like her. She rents a room in an old hotel and stares out the window for hours at a time. Scottie doesn't know what to make of these things, or of her husband's insistence that she may be possessed by the spirit of a dead woman.
Then, one day, Scottie finds a stranger thing happening: he is beginning to fall in love with this woman.
"Vertigo" is a mystery definitely unlike any other. I doubt that you will see any of the film's plot twist coming. I know that I didn't. The twists in this movie are like curve balls thrown by the arm of an incredibly gifted pitcher. Few people could evoke suspense with the skill of Alfred Hitchcock, and that was never more apparent than here. He uses every tool at his command to tell this story: camera angles, tracking shots, bizarre dream sequences and even lighting cues so subtle that you barely notice them all create a sense of dread and peculiarity that you can't quite put your finger on. It's a haunting film from the first frame until the last.
Bernard Herrman's music is also worth noting. He and Hitch were usually in cahoots, and there is no difference here. The music, as much as any other tool at Hitch's command, masterfully sets the tone without hitting us over the head with it. He suggests what we should feel, rather than battering us over the head with it.
And the performances are all top notch. Particularly Kim Novak as the haunting and haunted woman who soon becomes Jimmy's object of obsession and Jimmy as a man so caught up in his own obsessions that the people around him are made to suffer for it. Jimmy has never been better than he is here, and it is amazing to watch him sink so completely into this role. It is so much more complex than most of his roles, which were, in themselves, nothing simple.
There is so much meat for him to bite into here, and he is excellent. One of the best and most disturbing performances that I have seen.
You get the sense in this film that Hitch was doing something personal here. He was not doing something for the masses as much as he was making a private film, a film that had something deep and personal and painful to say. After all, he did have that legendary thing for blondes, which Jimmy shares here.
But, for its age, "Vertigo" has an extraordinary power to shock, haunt, mesmerize and disturb. Better than anything else Hitchcock has ever done, if you ask me, and more than worthy of two hours of your time. Just try to get that last scene out of your mind after seeing it. You won't. I know I won't.