DUM-dum-dum DEE-dee-dee, DUM-dum-dum DEE-dee-dee

Rating: 9/10 (17 December 1999)

`Vertigo' is Hitchcock's first deeply odd film. There would be two more: `The Birds' (1963) and `Marnie' (1964). After that he returned to the straight-forward, sane plots of his youth. (`Frenzy' (1972), for instance, is yet another version - by my count, the fifth - of `The 39 Steps'.)
`Rope' was filmed all in one continuous shot, and `Spellbound' had dream sequences designed by Salvador Dali, but that's not the kind of thing I mean. It's the moral outlook of `Vertigo' that's odd. `OF COURSE Scottie will behave in this fashion,' Hitchcock seems to be saying. `Who wouldn't?' I don't know why I'm so willing to play along: maybe it's the surreal way San Fancisco is shot so that it appears to be a city not of this Earth, maybe the score by Bernard Herrmann. (It's easily and beyond doubt Herrmann's best Hitchcock score). Part of the reason I so enjoy following a film that is, objectively speaking, so slow, surely has to do with the fact that Scottie's motivation is explained, but it's never explained in advance. An air of suspense permeates the picture without being concentrated in any one part.
I find it hard to understand the people who prefer `North by Northwest'. IF you're a fan of the American Hitchcock - I'm an Anglophile, myself - then this is surely the apotheosis, the perfect expression of everything Hitchcock had been reaching towards in America. This is a film GROWN in America, not a transplant from foreign soil the way `North by Northwest' is. (Yes, I know it's based on something French, but that's beside the point: it's the place where Hitchcock first makes the transfer to celluloid that's important.) Preferring `Rear Window' or `Psycho', on the other hand: THAT I could understand.
To conclude with a gauche display of star-worship, Kim Novak is surely Hitchcock's most attractive ever female lead - and she plays an interesting character, too, which is more than can be said for most of Hitchcock's actresses. If Scottie must become obsessed to the point of madness with anyone, let it be her. Sorry, Midge, but that's what you're up against.