Vertigo (1958)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Film Review

What else is there to say about Vertigo?  Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, a film that demands multiple viewings, a work of cinematic art that gives us the most haunting and desperate portrayal of romantic love... Vertigo may not have enjoyed commercial or critical success when it was first released in 1958, but its reputation has since grown to the point that hardly any serious film enthusiast would challenge its claim to fame as one of the most important American films of the Twentieth Century.

Vertigo is a psychological thriller par excellence but it is clearly far more than that.  It is a film of great subtlety and complexity that ventures into the darker avenues of human experience, surprising with its emotional depth and seductively lyrical in its dreamlike portrayal of an unattainable love.  This is unquestionably one of Hitchcock's most personal films and reveals more about his own character and beliefs than much of his other work.  Hitchcock, like all great artists, was a perfectionist and Vertigo is a film that is first and foremost about man's unceasing search for perfection in an imperfect world.   This is about as close to being a self-portrait as Hitchcock could ever have hoped to make.

In Vertigo, we see a man who has lived a humdrum bachelor life for fifty or so years suddenly come across his perfect woman.  Just as quickly as she entered his life, she leaves it.  It is a transitory experience, but one that has changed him forever.   The woman he saw, or imagined he saw, must be brought back.  This need quickly transforms itself into obsession.  But this mania for converting the cobwebs of a dream into hard reality merely propels the hero into a spiralling psychological vortex from which escape is impossible.    The artist is never satisfied, neither is the lover.  Reality can never match up to the pristine blueprint in our minds.  And so on we go, trying to hammer the ugly world around us into the way we want it, always failing, always frustrated, but unable to admit defeat.  What is human existence but an endless striving for perfection that can never be realised?

The plot of Vertigo has some real life parallels.  Hitchcock had originally wanted Vera Miles - the female lead of his earlier The Wrong Man (1956) -  to play the role of Madeleine.  Unfortunately, she announced she was pregnant just as the film was about to go into production, and so the role went to Kim Novak.  Hitchcock's struggle to fashion Novak in the image of Miles has some resonance with the main character's frantic attempt to resurrect the woman he fell in love with through another woman who resembles her.

Vertigo has some of the most effective and imaginative camerawork of any Hitchcock film, and this, perhaps more than anything, is what makes the film so compelling and atmospheric.  The most famous shot is the "vertigo effect" in the church tower, which was achieved by the camera zooming in and tracking backwards at the same time.  This couldn't be realised on the full-size set so it was shot using a model, adding to the expressionistic unreality of the film's most memorable sequence.

Hitchcock's bold use of colour is also interesting, with red and green predominating alternately, like subliminal traffic lights, accentuating the film's hypnotic dreamlike character.  Red for danger is the reasoned conscience that warns the hero to back off, whilst green for go is the unthinking impulse that impels him to carry on - a rather apt metaphor for life. 

Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo is one of the most famous ever composed for a film and evokes with terrifying dissonance a mood of escalating mental derangement, as experienced by a man who sees the walls of a shaky reality crumbling around him.  The screenplay, written by the gifted playwright Samuel A. Taylor, was  adapted from a French thriller novel, Sueurs froides: d'entre les morts, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, whose earlier novel Celle qui n'était plus had previously been adapted by H.G. Clouzot as Les Diaboliques (1955).

Another area where Vertigo excels is the quality of the performances.  In one of the highpoints of his career, James Stewart gives a vivid portrayal of a man's descent into Hell as obsession takes him over, transforming him from nice Mr Average into someone possessed by demonic forces issuing from dark pent up desires.  Stewart's chilling Jekyll and Hyde act is equally matched by Kim Novak's startling dual performance, with the actress skilfully delineating between her two characters, the austere Madeleine and the earthy Judy.  The Stewart and Novak pairing worked so well that not long afterwards they appeared together in a subsequent film, Bell, Book and Candle (1958), another tale of romantic obsession, but one with a distinctly lighter tone and a far happier outcome.

Film Synopsis

When a rooftop chase ends in the death of one of his colleagues, San Francisco cop John Ferguson suddenly develops chronic acrophobia, an irrational fear of heights which forces him into early retirement.    Out of the blue, a man he met at college, Gavin Elster, contacts him and offers him work as a private detective.  Recently, Elster has become concerned about his wife Madeleine's strange behaviour.  The root of the mystery appears to be Madeleine's great grandmother, who committed suicide after having been cast aside by her husband.  Fearing that his wife may be on the point of killing herself, Elster hires Ferguson to trail her.  As he follows Madeleine, Ferguson's professional detachment soon turns into a deep fascination for the attractive young woman.  Elster's fears are borne out when Madeleine tries to drown herself.  Ferguson saves her and realises that he is in love with her.  But then tragedy strikes.  Ferguson's acrophobia prevents him from following Madeleine as she races to the top of a church tower from which she throws herself.   Madeleine's death causes Ferguson to have an immediate nervous breakdown.  Some time later, not long after leaving a psychiatric clinic, the retired cop comes across a woman who bears a striking resemblance to Madeleine.  Fate has given him a second chance - or so it seems...