Desperate love story with murder on the wing

Rating: 10/10 (25 July 2009)

Vertigo (1958)
This movie isn't quite about what it seems to be about at first, and we shift from an odd detective case to a case of falling in love, to a case of just falling, and then the movie goes through one of the most convincing psychological twists in cinema. That is, the second portion of the movie is a brilliant inquiry into the mind of the retired detective played by Jimmy Stewart, and into obsession, and eventually to revelation. While the crime is solved eventually, it's really a small point. This is a love story, and a complicated one but also a passionate one. The ending will leave you gasping.
There are celebrated aspects to note: the psychedelic insert in the middle as a dream, the zoom/pull effects of vertigo, even the classic femme fatale/plain girl contrast (the latter a brilliant Barbara Bel Geddes). And there are some less known touches, like the green neon lighting used on the interior of the room at the Empire Hotel, or the generally clear vivid brilliant Technicolor palette. There are bit parts and famous sets (the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Bautista Mission, which didn't actually have a bell tower like this one (that was added through cinema trickery).
There is also an amazing use of subjective effects--the light falling improbably, or a haze covering the scene for no reason except the main character's mind. Much of this stuff pushes Hitchcock into true art film territory, and yet he keeps it a mainstream commercial flick that is accessible and popular.
Most of all there is subtle deception between characters and between the movie and the viewer. Hitchcock has never preferred the sudden surprise, leaving the viewer in ruins (or just in shock). Instead, he tells you what's going on--in this case, we learn of the murderous truth halfway through the film, so that we aren't wasting energy solving the crime but are instead trying to get into the characters' heads. It is the psychology, and the conflict of desire and doubt, that drive the movie. It's not slow, by the way, it's lyrical.
Some people might object to the falseness of many of the key scenes, but that's the nature of films that are not purely naturalistic. And the nature of nearly all of Hitchcock movies after 1940. Absorb the style as brush strokes--they don't get in the way of verisimilitude once you agree the truth is not the point. Drama and beauty and originality are. All of those are here full force.