A valiant, but flawed effort by The Master (Possible Spoilers)

Rating: 7/10 (15 July 2006)

Vertigo is a good movie by a great director. Viewing Vertigo several times recently, and reading Dan Aulier's brilliant in-depth look at the making of this movie, I am at a loss to explain what I see as a vastly hyperbolic reaction to this movie by many people both in the realm of professional critics and posters on IMDb. This is not Hitchcock at his best, although I do believe it could have been. True, Hitchcock was at his peak in this period, but there are enough flaws in Vertigo to bring this potential masterwork down several notches.
The first problem in Vertigo lies with the story's failure to establish Scottie Ferguson. We first meet Scottie as he fails to make the rooftop leap and is hanging by a gutter of a building several dozen feet from the ground. After this we see him making his decision to retire from police work. The audience is deprived of any referent to the type of person Scottie was before the incident on the rooftop. This failure to establish the character and set a benchmark to measure his return by in the closing minutes of the film deprives the audience of a vital connection to any character. But this problem could have easily been overcome had the third fatal flaw, which I will take up soon, been avoided.
The second problem in Vertigo is a decision by Hitchcock and George Tomasini, the editor, to insert a scene shortly after Scottie meets Judy that reveals all of the secrets the story holds. This throws away the element of suspense that might have had audiences on the edge of their seats during the final part of the movie, unable to relax even at the moment of revelation for Scottie's character as the movie would sweep them up and hurl them through the roller-coaster ride that the climax of the movie should have been. But I think Hitchcock and company made the decision as a direct result of an even earlier and worse mistake.
The third, and most glaring, mistake Hitchcock made with Vertigo was in the casting. Most of the cast does work ranging from passable to outstanding, with one notable exception: Jimmy Stewart. In Aulier's account of the Vertigo project he details how Stewart came to star in this movie, which had a lot more to do with the desires of Lew Wasserman, agent to both Stewart and Hitchcock, than good judgment. Jimmy Stewart was the wrong man for this role, and Aulier recounts that Hitchcock himself blamed Stewart for Vertigo's dismal showing at the box office. Hitchcock concluded that Stewart was too old for the part and refused to cast him in North by Northwest because of this. But I don't think Stewart's age was the real hindrance here, I think Jimmy Stewart tried to step way beyond his range as an actor and falls flat in certain key scenes. Mr. Stewart does a passable job in the first half of the movie, and is quite believable as the ex-detective brought low by his vertigo-inducing acrophobia. The first real hint of trouble comes in the last scene of the first half, Scottie sits in a sanitarium incommunicado and withdrawn as his stalwart friend Midge tries to engage him in conversation. Stewart's playing of this borders on the comedic with a deer-in-the-headlights gaze that calls to mind one of the Warner Brother's toons after being conked on the head rather than a man ravaged by guilt. It drags the scene down so much that Barbara Bel Geddes is left to carry it on her own, and she does make a valiant attempt but her efforts are hindered by Stewart. From this point forward the movie enters its most crucial phase and Stewart's ineffectualness grows more obvious in each successive scene. In the scene where Scottie tries to convince Judy to change her hair color Stewart's phrasing and pitch are semi-comedic. The lack of chemistry between the two leads brings the haunting scene of Judy's emergence from the bathroom to a crashing halt as Stewart is unable to infuse his performance with even a modicum of passion. But a few minutes later Stewart's performance goes completely south as the movie's climatic moments unfold. Scottie is righteously angry as the truth dawns on him, but, unfortunately, Stewart does not play angry well at all. His maniacal and slightly feminine delivery from this point on detracts from what could have been cinematic magic. At a point in the movie where Scottie should have regained his senses and his sense of manhood his tone and pitch shrilly foreshadow the strident tones of Mrs. Bates in Hitchcock's next project.
No doubt my remarks here will be met with disdain by some of the film's more ardent boosters on IMDb. I shall join the ranks of the great unwashed heathens who do not understand great cinema nor Vertigo's rightful placement at the apex of that pyramidal structure. I do appreciate Hitchcock's use of color as subtext in the film (I am particularly fond of the color and lighting shifts in Midge's apartment when she allows Scottie to view her painting). I also appreciate and easily grasp the undertones of Hitchcock's own obsessive behavior with the leading ladies of his work, but wonder if that subtext was intended as dramatic irony or whether Mr. Hitchcock was even aware of the mirror he was peering into. But, the brilliant touches of a master artist are not enough to make up for what this film lacks. Hitchcock was indeed The Master, and his body of work stands above a field of mostly mediocre efforts that his peers were turning out, and even today not one exists who can approach his mastery, but to suggest that Vertigo is the cinematic equivalent of Leonardo's Mona Lisa is ludicrous and undeserved.