Mistrust all towers

Rating: 10/10 (30 January 2009)

This film is one of the best and not only of Hitchcock's films, but of all universal global cinema. What's good about it? Everything. And yet what exactly, if I may ask? First of all it is a beautiful love story. A man who has been disabled by life, or rather by his profession  he was a cop and saw his partner die by falling from a roof when trying to save him  and his developing a severe case of acrophobia, is hired by a friend of his to watch his wife and find out what she is doing in her afternoons when she gets out and does not seem to remember later in the evening what she has done. The man falls in love with the woman who is of course not the wife but a bait that is supposed to make that man witness her suicide, or rather the husband's wife's murder by the husband himself. But that he cannot know. And that love will survive that event, and even his second phase of disability, this time entirely mental since he feels guilty for having been unable to stop the woman when climbing in the tower of the Mission's church because of his acrophobia. And this love survives so well that he falls again when he sees the woman again in the hotel room where he had seen her when she was baiting him into the drama, though now he does not know it is her, he just thinks she looks like her. And she falls again herself in spite of all her attempts at resisting. And the next phase in the drama is going to lock up these two in total bleakness. But there I stop. You have to find out these superb details all by yourself. The second reason that the film is a masterpiece of global cinema is because it is a thriller that is so well sown up and patched up and glued up that even if you know every detail you will enjoy it just the same: it is a thriller that deserves to be watched a hundred times. The haute cinematographic couture of Hitchcock makes every single viewing more enjoyable than the previous one. Even, I think, you may see in the one hundredth viewing elements you had not seen before because the film, each frame of the film, each image of the film, is loaded with myriads of details that are all more significant than the others. And yet it does not look neither baroque nor rococo. It is just perfect and yet so rich that the perfection takes one hundred viewings to be seen. The third reason why this film is a jewel is that Hitchcock plays on height and stairs and staircases and climbing, and descending or ascending, as he so often, or should I say always, does. Here the stairs are coming naturally since we are in San Francisco and the streets are going up and down, and the houses are perched on slanting slopes, and the embankments have stairs to walk into the Bay, and naturally all buildings, churches, hotels, and whatever have stairs in the front and stairs in the back and stairs inside to go up to the upper floors. And the best is of course the staircase going to the top of the church tower in the Mission, and we will go up that winding staircase twice. And we will fly down that staircase twice in exactly the same way. And the whole film will be dominated by the long apparition of the Golden Gate Bridge, that bridge under which all fish bite into the bait that is thrown at them and are fished out of the foaming water into the burning furnace of the hell of a frying pan. The staircase metaphor is powerful in that film, and so natural, that we just wonder if at that moment Hitchcock has not been able to control his own derangement and we can maybe envisage the fact that he is not completely schizophrenic or psychotic, just psychedelic. The last thing I would like to say on that film is that Hitchcock is also a master of rhythm. He must have been a conductor in some other life of his and his temperament is definitely not perfect. He likes rhythmic variations and he can have scenes that seem so slow that they must last hours and some others that go in a wink of an eyelid. But it is neither haphazard nor unjustified nor in any way disturbing or boring. Every single pace, no matter what, is entirely ingrained in the plot and is part of the beauty of the film and our pleasure. We don't even have the freedom to breathe some when the rhythm is going down because then the dramatic tension goes up and vice versa. The denser the slower and the faster the least intense, but then the two together always give the maximum meaningful signification you can imagine.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines