Hitchcock at his most revealing best!

Rating: 10/10 (5 February 2006)

One of Hitchcock's three best movies (North by Northwest and Rear Window are my other two favorites) which I can watch over and over again.
The external reviews for Vertigo will give you more insight into this movie than I can but for me, when I first saw this movie in the late '50s (I was very young), it planted the seeds that drove me to move to the bay area from the east. My obsessions were cultivated later.
The setting, San Francisco at its prime, with its hills and sharp light contrasts because of the surrounding waters add to the ever changing but hypnotic backdrop of this color film. Even Bernard Herrmann's music score emphasis the mood swings of its characters to pull the viewer into its vortex.
Vertigo is a dizzying production of dark and light, ups and downs. It is the story of one man's obsessions for controlling his surroundings and desires to a point where his life is spinning out of control. Or is it? It has been written that Hitchcock in real life was controlling and manipulative ("All actors should be treated like cattle") and why all the blonde, austere, frigid women? So, plot, acting, direction, photography and music are all mingled to give the viewer a wonderful, mesmerizing, voyeuristic look into obsessive behavior. More relative today, almost 50 years later!