Fascinating, personal, but not Hitchcock's finest

Rating: 8/10 (1 August 2004)

This is without question one of Hollywood's most beautiful and original films of the 1950s, but its thin story leads to some unevenness.
The first half consists mainly of Stewart following Novak around San Francisco -- as another poster comments, "I hope you like shots of people driving." It's fairly mysterious and beautifully shot, but awfully leisurely. For once in Hitchcock (as sometimes in the work of younger directors like Scorsese and DePalma, who idolize this film) one feels there's more style here than substance.
Hitchcock had a perverse love for process shots; luckily in this film they are first-rate. If the automobile process shots had been as bad here as in some of his pictures, the first hour of VERTIGO would have been hard to take.
(Spoilers begin here.) Then there's the abrupt revelation to the audience of what's really been going on, handled a bit awkwardly by Novak having a sort of vision. There's Stewart's nightmare, which looks dated now. Then the film speeds through the Judy section to the exciting ending -- here the pace seems too fast, as it seemed too slow in the first half of the story.
These quibbles aside, much of the film is truly brilliant. I don't understand why anyone complains about Novak's superb, tense, even profound performance. It may be the deepest female character, and performance, in any Hitchcock film. Every moment of it feels right and rings true in the film's dream-like context.
James Stewart, one of Hollywood's finest leading men, outdoes himself here, taking his beloved "everyman" persona into dangerous new areas: naked anguish, self-torture, sadism. I can't think of a single Hollywood leading man today who could pull off such a risky, emotionally-exposed performance. The unexpected depth and perfection of Novak's and Stewart's performances are major reasons for this film's high rating.
Overall VERTIGO is brilliant, a masterpiece, so it's easy to forgive Hitchcook for a few sequences that drag. Maybe the draggy pace even contributes to one's sense that the film is a vivid dream -- or a nightmare.