Not Hitch's best

Rating: 4/10 (18 August 2010)

Do not be fooled, this is by far Hitchcock's best film.
I think this has a lot to do with the bare naked screenplay stripped of its social context. Which you may think is unfair. But a film in the modern era does not rely on the life-story of the director or the 'readiness' of current society to appreciate it.
Perhaps Hitch was opening himself up in a way previously unseen, perhaps the film was 'off-the-wall' for the audience of the time, ushering in a new era of film-making, but let us look at this thing as a single, self-contained package. It fails dismally.
The screenplay and story-line have so many holes and inconsistencies, very rare for Hitchcock, that make this film, regardless of intellectual depth, an inferior film. Regardless of how much you may 'like' or 'get it' in this film, these cinematic faults cannot be denied and rob the film very easily of its title as Hitchcock's greatest, or even as a great film, which it certainly is not.
It is not a great film, perhaps a good one, but certainly not great, or even very good. It is mediocre, and we only need to reveal Hitchcock's very own admission that James Stewart's casting was an awful and unforgivable mistake that makes the entire situation unbelievable. Merely the surface of the films atrociousness. This lead actor was ridiculously miscast and that the Director of the film did not do something about it at an opportune time speaks volumes about the sloppiness of this work.
Vertigo is a one of the saddest indictments of humanities willingness to collapse its opinions under the pressure of authority. An authority which started with one positive review of the film in the late sixties, a decade after the film was rightfully scathed at the box-office and cascaded to an overwhelming belief that this is one of Hitch's greatest moments. It certainly is not, in fact it is one of his saddest.