Only the most shallow man would fail to be impressed by appearances.

Rating: 8/10 (12 October 2008)

"Vertigo" is considered Hitchcock's masterpiece by high-brows and viewed as a slow, dull movie by proletarians. Indulge this Olympian generalizations for a moment.
If you don't know the story by now, it goes something like this. Jimmy Stewart is a San Francisco detective retired from the force because he contracted a severe case of acrophobia on the job. An old college friend, Gavin Elster, hires him to follow Elster's wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak) around. Elster is afraid Madeleine is going nuts. Stewart takes the job and is soon hooked on the lovely Madeleine. He rescues her from a suicide attempt, lugs her unconscious body to his own apartment, undresses her, and puts her in his bed until she recovers.
Stewart and Madeleine fall in love, but she's still balmy and climbs to the tower of an old church to kill herself. Stewart can't follow because of his acrophobia. He blames himself. Later, while wandering the city streets, he spots a girl named Judy Barton (also Kim Novak) who resembles the departed Madeleine. Stewart gets to know her, squires her around, and step-by-step has her dress and groom herself exactly like his lost love. Then he discovers that Judy IS in fact his lost love. Judy was in cahoots with Gavin Elster and Stewart was a victim of a hoax designed to get rid of Elster's real wife. It ends tragically.
It's neither a masterpiece nor dull, really. I don't doubt for a minute that it's Hitchcock's most personal movie. Cripes, he's got this luscious blond he keeps dressing and undressing, gorgeous and sexy, but also unattainable and ghostly. (A ghost of substantial heft, though.) That was always Hitchcock's fantasy, the icy Nordic who would attack you in the back seat of a taxi. (Poor Alma Reville, his wife, a rather homely brunette dwarf.) On top of the personal interest that Hitchcock lavished on the story, he adds some technical dazzle. Not too much. The acrophobic detective stares down the tall campanile and the camera simultaneously zooms in and dollies back. The tactic was so successful it's been imitated a number of times. And when Stewart and Novak finally kiss and make love in her green-lighted apartment, the director has them and the camera on a turntable that slowly revolves and shows us varied haunting backdrops. And the movie wouldn't be what it is without Bernard Hermann's romantic and oneiristic score.
The whole film is meant to be dream-like and that's why it's understandable that some people would see it as irritatingly slow. It follows Edgar Allan Poe's theory of literary aesthetics. Poe threw reason off the bell tower and went for eerie effects, period. A man buries a murder victim under the floor but nails a cat in with the body by mistake. How can anyone miss a cat that's in the burial chamber?
I can imagine viewers now, squirming, and asking, "Where the hell is the logic in this movie?" Let's put it this way. You are a girl named Judy Barton. You're pretty but have no marketable skills. A very wealthy man comes to you and offers you money to help him kill his wife. All you have to do is impersonate the wife and trap a former detective named Jimmy Stewart into falling in love with you and then lead him to a place where the wife can be safely killed and still look like suicide.
Then, after the rich dude takes off for Europe, leaving you to become your slovenly self, you accidentally run into the victimized Stewart on the streets. (In a city of 700,000.) He doesn't recognize you, naturally, because now, having reverted to your original persona, you look like an overly made-up hooker. But he follows you home, knocks on your door, introduces himself, and asks you for a date. I ask you -- the discerning, sophisticated, somewhat street-savvy viewer -- would you accept? Would you date a man who will almost inevitably find out you're a murderess? One slip of the tongue could do it. The only person stupid enough to accept would also bury a black cat alongside a dead body.
Kim Novak is a lot more effective as Madeleine than as Judy. The latter persona is coarse but tender too. The former is elegant and speaks in a ghostly whisper. Kim Novak was probably right for the part. As Judy, she has these overemphatic eyebrows that lend her the appearance of a Universal monster, perhaps one of the lesbian vampires that smiles as she pours you the drugged wine. But of Hitchcock's other actresses at the time, who else could have done better? The photography is splendid. And the director takes us on a Cook's Tour of many of the Bay Area landmarks -- Ernie's restaurant (now gone), Muir Woods almost, The Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fort Point, Mission San Juan Bautista (which has no tower), Point Lobos. And every day is perfectly sunny. Stewart re-dresses Novak at an expensive shop that was Ransohoff's at the time. It, too, is now gone but I took my wife to its less expensive replacement and insisted she buy a signature gray suit with a soft white shirt and a pair of brown heels. She swore she would do no such thing. After a slight scuffle, not nearly as athletic as the papers made it out to be, we wound up with some cheap scrap of an apron. (She never wore it.) It's only in a film in which there is no place for common sense, let alone genuine logic, that a man can create a new woman or resurrect an old one.
I find it a fascinating movie, technically almost perfect, and worth repeated viewings if they're not repeated too often. (It's pretty depressing.) It's at once demanding and rewarding. And I'm certainly glad Hitchcock made it, if only to get it out of his system.