Review # 300 : VERTIGO - HITCHCOCK'S GREATEST.

Rating: 10/10 (6 January 2019)

My Rating : 10/10 ♠ MASTERPIECE ♠
RUNNING TIME : 127 MINS
BUDGET : $2.5 MIL
BOX OFFICE : $3.2 MIL
TRIVIA -
Hitchcock spent years trying to recreate the psychological state of dizziness or vertigo on film. He finally achieved it by combining a forward zoom with a reverse tracking shot. The effect is used several times in the film: in the opening sequence, when the officer falls from the roof of the building; and later, in the view down the mission stairwell (a shot that cost $19,000 for a mere few seconds).
REVIEW -
Brilliant but notoriously difficult director Alfred Hitchcock was given to playing often sadistic practical jokes on his cast and crew. Some say the idea for the film was driven by the director's own obsession with Vera Miles. The actress he wanted to cast but couldn't due to her pregnancy. So incensed at Miles' temerity in getting pregnant for the third time, Hitch told her 'that two was sufficient, but that three was really obscene'. He tried to replicate her with the many elegant blondes he cast in subsequent films. Novak paid for not being Miles when Hitchcock forced her to do endless retakes, reducing her to tears. Vertigo, his most personal film, reveals much about the director's own need for control and his obsession with the feminine 'ideal', and about his determination to find in art possibility to transcend daily life.
The visual poetry, the pull of the film's haunting landscape, and it's portrait of the human longing for transcendence for love or art sends us down a new intriguing pathway. Old Hitch is still playing with our heads, but this time he breaks through to our hearts.
ONE OF THE DEFINITE GREATEST MOTION PICTURES EVER MADE.