a film for the ages

Rating: 10/10 (31 March 2008)

It's not hard to see why Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' is considered one of the greatest films ever made. It is a beautifully textured and layered movie, mysterious and confusing, but in a good sense. It's a pity really that it has to come to an end and have it's many components 'explained;' the enjoyment one gets is from imagining all the possibilities conjured up in one's head while watching it. 'Vertigo' might be called an art film masquerading as mainstream entertainment, an apt if ironic description given its subject matter. The plot, to put it as simply as possible- a detective falls in love with a woman twice, the second time not realizing it is the same woman. She deceives him into thinking she is someone else, both times. A two-page synopsis of the various ins and outs of the story would do it no more justice. James Stewart plays the detective, Scottie Ferguson. I've always wondered why Hitchcock chose Stewart to play this role. Being the great actor he was, he does a fine job and is very convincing, but if I were to have read this script at the time and been asked to think of, say, fifty working actors to consider for the part, James Stewart would have come in fifty-first. There just is nothing in the actor's previous body of work to suggest he is right for the character in any way. The gangly, drawling, slow-talking, clearheaded, common-sensed Everyman made perfect sense for a movie like 'It's A Wonderful Life.' But to play an obsessed, neurotic, acrophobic, compulsive control freak who practically forces himself on a woman and insists she dress up like the presumed-dead, former object of his affections... Jimmy Stewart? You've got to be joking. And yet somehow it works. Kim Novak as the woman is easier to figure out. She was the latest in a series of icy blondes just waiting to be unfrozen in Hitchcock films; this was a continuing theme in his movies that would continue long past 'Vertigo.' Novak captures the strange Madeleine and more common Judy very well; it is quite believable that the second character is, at first, intended to be a completely different woman. Much of the magic of 'Vertigo' comes from not only wondering what will happen next, but pondering what has just happened, and what it means. Rational explanations become less and less interesting. This is what I meant about the ending- outside of a supernatural one, there's almost no way a movie like 'Vertigo' can have a completely satisfactory outcome. One certainly has to give Hitchcock credit for coming as close as possible. He was not one for the paranormal anyway (I suppose 'The Birds' comes closest); his flights of fantasy have more to do with human motivations and the bizarre, sometimes insane workings of the mind. 'Vertigo' takes this approach, and in the characters of Scottie and Madeleine/Judy, shows the most extreme manifestations of desire, submission, and delusion.