A Deeply Flawed Diamond

Rating: 5/10 (12 August 2012)

This is a film of very mixed quality. The first hour and 25 minutes of this 2 hour 10 minute film are incredibly, almost inconceivably, boring and consist mostly of close ups of James Stewart's face while he silently drives around tailing a delusional, deranged woman.
At this point of the movie the story seems to be about a woman who thinks she was someone who died 200 years earlier in a past life. Watching this stage of the film is a profoundly boring experience and is an astonishing 75% of the movie!
The characters, the situations they find themselves in and especially the dialog, everything about that first 85 minutes in fact, is so bland and boring it's hard to sit through it. After 45 minutes of James Stewart looking in his rear view mirror and mugging to the camera you need serious commitment not to abandon ship.
Oddly for Hitchcock, the problem is that there is simply a complete lack of suspense. We simply don't care that she thinks she is a reincarnated woman from the 1790's because that storyline doesn't seem to be going anywhere in particular as the only explanation is that the character is insane, so it isn't interesting to watch James Stewart follow her around and watch her run her delusional errands
The last 35 minutes, from the (deservedly) famous dream sequence onward are compelling. I didn't see that twist coming and anyone who says they did (as a few reviewers claim) is lying. Incidentally, the so called plot holes are easily explained away with any number of possible explanations.
For the first time there is something interesting going on. Where before the dialog consisted of banal exchanges between Stewart and Barbara Bel Geddes that simply padded out the movie and served to advance the plot by letting the viewer know what was going on (without being the slightest bit entertaining), there is a real sense of gripping drama in every exchange as Stewart the mentally fragile retired detective puts it all together and Kim Novak tries to have her cake and eat it, and almost succeeds.
I give the first hour and 25 minutes 1 star because it is one of the most tortuously boring sequences anyone has ever bothered capturing on film, and the last 35 minutes 10 stars out 10, averaging the overall score out to 5 stars out of 10. If the first part of the movie was just pruned to perhaps 25 minutes long, or if it had simply been done in a more interesting way, it could have put this movie into an entirely different league.
The reason this movie is so overrated (as a whole, notwithstanding it's incredibly powerful final 35 minutes) is simply because as it was unavailable for 30 years from the end of it's original cinematic release until 1986, it's legend grew and grew and it became trendy. The incredibly inaccessible nature of the first 85 minutes appealed to certain types of superficial people we all know. They will tell you that this is Hitchcock's greatest movie, the greatest movie ever made in fact, and if you don't understand that you aren't as smart as them. We know better.