Vertigo (1958)

Though director Alfred Hitchcock was then at the height of his critical success and commercial fame, Vertigo was not a well-liked film at the time of its release. Most criticism focused on the intricate and unlikely plot dependent on a fiendishly implausible murder scheme on the part of a thinly characterized villain, whose exposure is about as much as of surprise as the ending of your average Scooby-Doo episode. The climax is so concerned with something else that the killer seems to get away with it. Closer to the mark, there was genuine feeling of discomfort at the nasty little relationship between Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak around which the film turns. But during a lengthy period in which Vertigo was unavailable for copyright reasons, the film was critically reassessed. Now it is held to be one of the Master's greatest worked, even ranked by the American Film Institute as the #9 greatest American film ever.

John "Scottie" Ferguson (Stewart) is a San Francisco cop who quits the force after a prologue in which his fear of heights prevents him from saving the life of a colleague. Working casually as a private eye, he is hired by old friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Elmore) to tail his wife Madeleine (Novak), an icy blond who is apparently obsessed with a look-alike ancestress who drowned in the 19th Century. The first half of the film is almost a ghost story, as Scottie is drawn to neurotic, Madeleine, with the suggestion that her reincarnation is ironically going to lead to her death. Here, you get Hitchcock who was a master is atmosphere as well as suspense, and a genuine evocation of the unearthly. After Madeleine's fatal plunge from a bell tower, the film changes tack and becomes more intense, with Scottie going even further beyond Stewart's aw-shucks mannerisms into mania as he comes across Judy Barton (Novak again), a brassy brunette shop girl who resembles the lost Madeleine, and enters a relationship with her. Few mainstream Hollywood movies dare to be as unsettling as Vertigo is in the scenes where Scottie tries to force a new reincarnation of his lost love by manipulating the new girl as she is transformed by a new hairstyle and wardrobe into the elusive Madeleine. For many, the scene in which Judy is finally transformed and embraces Scottie with vampirish hunger is as emotionally devastating as the shower scene in Psycho is physically shocking.

Like several other Hitchcock greats (Rear Window, North by Northwest, Psycho), Vertigo has endlessly been imitated, homaged, and reworked. Movies like Brian DePalma's Obsession are feature length footnotes to the original. Technical tricks - the simultaneous zoom-in and track-back used to convey Stewart's vertigo - have been added to the repertoire (Steven Spielberg used it in Jaws). In all, Vertigo is a gorgeous, disturbing, icily romantic film, with steel grey Technicolor images, evocative moments of close-up surrealism, and an insistent, probing Bernard Herrmann score.

Quote of the Day - Scottie - "One final thing I have to do...then I'll be free of the past."

Tomorrow: Director #2 - John Ford; Rio Grande (1950)