Dizzy plot

Rating: 7/10 (21 July 2010)

Considered by many to be Hitchcock's masterpiece, Vertigo is overrated and not really one of Hitchcock's best films. Great, even good films, get better with repeated viewings, but not Vertigo. Despite Bernard Hermann's seductive score, excellent cinematography by Robert Burks, an interesting set up, and a story replete with Hitchcok's ironies and themes subsequent viewings make Gavin Elster's convoluted plot to murder his wife with Stewart's Scottie as an unwitting witness seems utterly preposterous, and impossible to pull off and stage. Surely, there are easier ways to get away with murder! And so much time is spent setting Scottie up for the fall that in retrospect much of it seems gratuitous. The overcomplicated murder plot recalls Hitchcok's stiff and stagy, Dial M for Murder(54). The plotting rather than the execution makes Vertigo inferior Hitchcock even though in many respects it's his most personal and audacious film. Much of the dialog between Stewart and Novak's Madelaine is awkward and tedious, and unnecessarily drawn out; one of the film's best sequences employs virtually no dialog. Both Saul Bass' animated dream sequence and Barbara Bel Geddes' Madge feel unnecessary as well. Nonetheless, Vertigo is an interesting film with the parts being better than the whole, and the less you know about it the better. Novak's wispy persona was never better suited to a film role, and Stewart's pale blue eyes are downright vertiginous. Recommended.