Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is a tantalizing masterpiece. The answers to its mysteries ebb and flow beyond your grasp, always so close but always out of reach. It opens itself up to various interpretations, letting you come to your own conclusions without ever affirming or rejecting them. The movie tackles a great many intertwining topics: for me, the most potent one is the need for people to control their own lives, sometimes by controlling others' lives as well. It contorts itself into a tale of obsessive love, of purity and perversion, and of deception and dual identities. It is dark, often morbid, and unsettling, but it is the kind of work you will never forget.The movie starts in the middle of a cop chase. Leaping from rooftop to rooftop, Scottie Ferguson (Stewart) slips and barely catches a gutter. Perilously hanging on for dear life, he looks down more than five stories and a crippling vertigo paralyzes him. Another policeman reaches down to help, only to fall to his own doom. Scottie's fear of heights is cemented through this traumatic event and he quits the police force. Soon after, he is contacted by an old college buddy who requests his assistance in tailing his wife. He suspects her of being possessed by a ghost and is afraid that the spirit inhabiting his wife, who committed suicide at age 26, will cause her to do the same thing. As he begins following her, Scottie develops an attraction for her that soon turns into an unhealthy fixation. But that is only half the story. After that, it spirals more and more out of control, beyond anything you could have predicted.
Watching Vertigo again, and thinking about it next to Notorious and Psycho, I am struck by Hitchcock's mastery of structure. He seems attracted to scripts with unconventional story arcs and plot progression. Most directors would struggle against invoking boredom with such an uncertain framework. Hitchcock uses it to his advantage to generate suspense, manipulate your expectations, and telegraph events to their breaking points. You have never seen a story told this way, and so you have no idea what might come next. In a horror movie like Psycho, that's the most terrifying fear you can imagine. In Vertigo, that's the strongest, most mesmerizing pull you will ever experience.
The casting of Jimmy Stewart, originally maligned by critics and by Hitchcock himself, turns out to be one of the film's greatest strengths. Stewart is America's hero, the original Tom Hanks, the everyman, the good guy; he is Mr. Smith at Washington and George Bailey with his wonderful life. And here he is deeply disturbed, twisted so far from his off-screen celebrity persona that you feel a torment brewing inside yourself. You want to care for him, you want to believe he is the sweet, kind-hearted soul you know and love, but witnessing his repugnant actions sickens you. No other actor could have pulled off that necessary duality.
The cinematography is, as always, remarkable. The signature track in, zoom out shot reminds us of his technical abilities, but there are many more scenes where his sense of atmosphere defines how he shoots. In the scene at Ernie's where Scottie first sees Madeleine (Novak), the camera moves as if in a dream. The room brightens when she passes by and dims after she leaves. Her platinum hair, pinned up into a spiral, and all-gray suit give her an eerie aura. Hitchcock's use of colors is entrancing; they are inserted into scenes with such presence and purpose that it makes you wonder what they mean. Because it has to mean something, right?
The movie has some flaws. The special effects, both in the opening credits and nightmare sequence, severely date the film. Several key plot points remain unexplained and some of the dialogue rings a little off to our modern ears. (Are people really diagnosed with "acute melancholia, coupled with a guilt complex"?) And for some reason, which may be entirely circumstantial and outside the realm of the film, the movie wasn't as gripping on this viewing as it has been in the past. Still, this is one of Hitchcock's finest movies. I'll now admit that Psycho is my favorite Hitchcock, but I would not have any cause to disagree with someone who placed Vertigo or Notorious in that spot. Vertigo is a masterpiece that would define the entire work of any other director and is essential viewing for anyone interested in cinema as an art form.
IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052357/