Hitchcock's Study of Madness and Obsession

Rating: 8/10 (17 February 2010)

In my first viewing of Vertigo, the movie let me down. It wasn't until I watched it again that I began rejoicing in its beauty and artistic quality, and even if today it's not one of my favorite movies, at least I've grown to respect it.
James Stewart plays Scottie, a San Francisco detective hired by an old friend to watch his wife, Madeleine: the husband thinks she's suffering from a mental disease in which she imagines herself being possessed by the spirit of a woman who killed herself. Scottie investigates her and eventually falls in love with her; he tries to help her overcome her belief that a spirit is possessing her, but in the end she kills herself just like the other woman.
The first part of the movie is a tense thriller, but it's the second part that really makes the movie the masterpiece it is. In it we discover how far a man will go to recover the love of a dead woman. Necrophilia, although the word is never used in this movie, is never too distant.
Stewart is amazing in the movie. The movie was a commercial failure and Hitchcock blamed it on Stewart's age, but for me the frail, slightly bumbling personality that he gave Scottie makes him one of the most interesting detectives in the history of cinema. And when he lets out all the darkness in his soul in the second part of the movie, then he reaches new heights of perversion.
But Kim Novak also deserves recognition for her performance, in which she must display several personalities over multiple roles.
This movie is not as exciting as Hitchcock's The Birds or North By Northwest: these are exciting movies that never stop; North By Northwest is a chase movie so it's always in motion; and The Birds has an atmosphere of dread that keeps the viewer on the edge even not much is happening. But Vertigo is Hitchcock doing a character study about obsession, love, insanity and jealousy.
The first sequence in the movie, a chase scene on rooftops, is followed by slower, but tense, scenes of detective work in which time slows down so the viewer can appreciate Scottie's mind at work as he puts the evidence together in Madeleine's mysterious case. Little by little the movie picks up its pace until the becomes a roller-coaster of tension by the end.
Two things stood out for me in the movie: the cinematography in its use of colors, especially green; we see it in all the key moments, whether in the trees, in Madeleine's costume or in neon lights. Also, the use of depth to portray Scottie's fear of heights - hence the vertigo of the title - was very imaginative.
And secondly, one cannot disregard Bernard Hermann's tragic score for the movie. Built on the music for Tristan and Isolde, Herrmann's score is perfect for a movie about doomed love: it's melancholy and dreamy. The movie wouldn't have been the same without the score's tone of tragedy it brought to it.