Perhaps the greatest film of the 20th century

Rating: Null/10 (19 May 2000)

This is the film that should be held up in recognition of the medium as a pure art form. Vertigo was unlike every film that came before it and still retains its unique power even as it influences countless modern directors, from Scorsese and Lynch to Gilliam and Burton.
Viewed today it looks cutting-edge and revolutionary, with its tantalising genre-bending and one of the few linear structures more bewildering and unsettling than Psycho. It is essentially an 80 minute and a 40 minute film sewn together and the experience is rather like living out someone's disturbing dream, then waking to find the reality is even worse.

The plot is Vertigo's weakest element. It ultimately emerges as preposterous, contrived and largely unconcerned with the demands of logic. However, it is difficult to summarise without revealing the key development that occurs some way in (although most reviewers give it away anyway), so this synopsis will be expository only. A San Francisco beat cop, Scottie Ferguson discovers during a fraught roof-top chase that he suffers from vertigo and is inadvertently responsible for the death of a colleague, who was trying to help him. Gutted, he retires from the force and leads a fairly routine life until an old friend contacts him with a private job; to follow his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak) who appears to be transfixed by the spirit of a dead relative and whose trances are becoming increasingly intense. Scottie agrees to follow Madeleine as she makes her way around the city each day, visiting the same few places and sitting quietly as if possessed. When she attempts suicide in the San Francisco bay, Scottie jumps in to rescue her and a relationship develops. Scottie tries to discover the reasons for her trances as the pair begin to fall in love.
What follows should not rightly be revealed because, like Psycho, the film is supposed to be watched with as little knowledge as possible of the plot twists. (Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to see the film for the first time without already knowing all but the ending.)
It is the most perplexing and intriguing of the Hitchcock legacy and broke the rules in so many ways that it's influence is felt even in films which appear unconnected. It was conceived under the jurisdiction of a Hollywood studio, but produced in conditions we would now associate with independent cinema, since Hitchcock's reputation allowed him almost total control over his stories and selection of cast and crew. It allows its "villain" to escape unpunished, with reward, which censorship had never permitted before. Symbols and meanings are created out of music, colours and other visual motifs in the most original way since Citizen Kane. The manipulation of its stars' personas and what audiences expect from them (Stewart especially, but Hitchcock as well) to enhance its power was extremely unusual in an age when actors were required to be instantly recognisable "types" to maintain their appeal. Finally, its world-view of corruption, sadism, loneliness and disaffection is presented with such unforgiving cynicism as to be absolutely suffocating to watch.
Vertigo is also a technical marvel, with the camerawork fluid and perfectly controlled (pioneering the now legendary zoom/track in reverse directions - see Jaws, Goodfellas, Three Kings etc). The photography has a dream-like beauty which only scenery-based films (Lawrence of Arabia, Badlands, The Thin Red Line) have matched; the music haunting and unforgettable; the performances astonishingly honest and brave.
But for all the achievements of Hitchcock's servants, it is his own personality which makes Vertigo the film it is. He orchestrates a story that is both emotionally involving and clinically cold. It is impossible to separate the film from our understanding of him as a director and the role that the director plays in creating the film experience for us. If Rear Window is an allegory of our impulses to watch and observe the images we see played out in front of us every day, then Vertigo is about taking it a step further and making our own; crafting and moulding people to resemble our fantasies, seizing back control from a world which has long since gone mad and left us to make what we can of the pieces.
Viewed a certain way, nearly all Hitchcock films can be interpreted as black comedies, wherein he found a quiet, slightly perverse amusement at the horrors he was putting up on screen. But what little humour there is Vertigo is not ironic, it is wry and often sad. It may be the only film where he truly dropped his popular "showman" facade and offered to the world something which borders on confession, perhaps even a plea for understanding and forgiveness. You can see adverts, pop videos and feature films which spoof famous scenes from Hitchcock's films; the crop duster in North by Northwest, the endless moments of "watching" in Rear Window or the shrieking shower-slaughter in Psycho. But when film-makers draw on scenes from Vertigo it is never to get laughs or brag about what they know, but usually to show respect and acknowledge their debt to Hitchcock. Nobody has set a comedy sketch in a bell-tower or a green neon-lit hotel room and they never will, because people the world over see Vertigo and often react exactly the same way, despite differences in culture and language. It is not about the terrorists, the freaks or the rejects of society that surface occasionally to pick off one of the ordinary folk, it is about the monster that lurks in everyone. It doesn't just rear its head on occasion, it subtly dominates everything we do to ourselves and each other and no-one, least of all Hitchcock, has found much to laugh about in that.