Best film of all time (as of yesterday)? Er, not quite, more Hitchcock once again doing his schtick (which is OK, but this is no masterpiece)

Rating: 5/10 (2 August 2012)

It's Thursday, August 2, 2012, and as of yesterday until it, too, is knocked off its perch, Hitchcock's Vertigo has been declared by the saintly cineastes around the world to whose apparently impeccable taste and judgment we are bound to bow as 'the greatest movie of all time'. Well, all I can say, is 'up to a point, Lord Copper'. The film it dislodged was Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, another 'masterpiece' which was also entertaining enough but . . . But then who am I do disagree, especially as others here use such superlatives as 'masterpiece', 'excellent' and 'perfect'?
However, disagree I do, with those verdicts and the judgment of that pantheon of cinema's saints about Vertigo and Citizen Kane. It's pertinent that I find the kind of 'rich list' mentality which always wants a top of the pops a tad tacky and infantile, but that in itself would be no reason to criticise Vertigo.
One bod pontificating on the radio yesterday (Nick James, the editor of Sight & Sound it was) admitted that on its release Vertigo was not especially popular with the critics who found the plot not just overwrought but downright ludicrous. But, he added, it has found greater recognition and popularity 54 years on because 'it has more to do with our inner lives (than Citizen Kane) and we're more interested in our inner lives than we have been for a while'. Give me a break.
For this viewer Vertigo is entertaining enough but has dated badly. It is shot through with the kind of cod psychology which was so popular with Fifties folk, and its style is still very rooted in the kind of melodrama which defined cinema when a young Alfred Hitchcock was learning his trade in the Twenties and early Thirties. And, yes, the plot is still ludicrous. That, of course, need not be a bad thing, but a director attempting something similar today would surely attempt a far more nuanced approach and use a scalpel to pare away at his or her material rather than the hammer and chisel Hitchcock employs.
In fact, were a director able to pull it off today, he would ensure that at first, second and third blush we would not even realise quite how ludicrous the plot is. Here's an example of quite how much Vertigo is not a masterpiece: Barbara Bel Geddes plays a character, a friend of Stewart's, who is in love with him, but is only in the film 1) to set the hare rolling by giving us Stewart's story in one of the opening scenes 2) acting as a red herring. She appears twice more, once in a very odd scene in which she tries - in a quite bizarre way - to show him she loves him, and then when Stewart is in the looney bin for six months after having a nightmare.
Most crucially, in that opening scene there are not one but two shots, both close-ups of Bel Geddes face, which apparently convey that: take note, there're more to this character than meets the eye. In fact, both shots and their spurious significance are irrelevant. After the character has appeared several times to serve Hitchock's purpose - well, forget the Barbara Bel Geddes character: Hitchcock has no more use for her and we never see her again. Masterpiece? Cineastes - I would prefer to put the word in inverted commas as in 'cineastes' - who often like to lord it over us given their superior knowledge of 'film history' and like nothing better than to have a valhalla of director heroes might well argue that 'introducing' the Barbara Bel Geddes character helps 'build up the suspense' and is Hitchcock 'at his most masterful'. Not really - sloppy scriptwriting would be more to the point.
So there you have it. I'm giving this a 5 out of 10 because it does the biz in Hitchcock's own way, but treat it and its special effects more as an historical artefact than 'the greatest movie of all time'. For a far better Hitchcock film, track down Lifeboat (with a screenplay by John Steinbeck).
Oh, and I've always fancied Kim Novak, and still do. That earned this film one more point than I thought it deserved.