Truly Great...Almost Brilliant

Rating: 9/10 (5 January 2007)

Whenever I watch this movie, I get to thinking that Hitchcock made a fantastic, wonderful film, but was just shy of breaking through into true brilliance. He was so close here to doing what he never actually ventured to do: create his own reality with film. Hitchcock is probably the greatest of the directors whose films always existed within what, for lack of a truly good term, we may call 'familiar reality' or 'objective reality'. With Vertigo, if he had done just a few things differently, it could have transcended this - he could have made a film that challenged our notions of reality, instead of abiding by its laws. He could have made his only truly 'surreal' film; as it is, its just a romance woven around a complex scam. I shouldn't say 'just'; after all, this is one of the greatest films of its era. There's no denying that Hitchcock was a genius of film-making (and I don't use the term 'genius' loosely); but with this film, he was just a step away from being one of cinema's greatest visionaries as well.