VERTIGO Hitchcock/USA/1958

If any movie ever overtakes CITIZEN KANE (1941) as “the greatest movie ever made,” it will likely be Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO. In this 1958 masterpiece of neurotic obsession, Hitchcock reveals more about his own neuroses than he did in any other film.

Hitchcock was a famously controlling director, especially when it came to the women in his movies. His lead actresses were the same, again and again: blonde, icy and aloof: Janet Leigh and Vera Miles in PSYCHO; Grace Kelly in REAR WINDOW; Eva Marie Saint in NORTH BY NORTHWEST; Tippi Hedren in THE BIRDS. He was notoriously controlling of these actresses----on- and off-screen----trying to remake them to his own near-fetishistic tastes.

VERTIGO, simply put, is the story of a man, Scottie (Jimmy Stewart)--something of a svelte stand-in for the portly Hitchcock himself in this film--who falls in love with a woman who doesn’t exist. His love-obsession is the creation of another man, who sets the plot in motion by paying a woman to double as his wife so that he can murder his real wife as Scottie, a retired police detective, witnesses what he thinks is an accident, or suicide. (And if that last sentence seems terribly convoluted, complex and confusing in the extreme, it's meant to: I refuse to spoil this film for those who may never have seen it.)

What makes VERTIGO a great movie is the way Hitchcock takes the viewer in; the way camera shots reveal character—for instance, how Scottie is always seen driving “down” hills in his obsessive stalking of a woman who is not who he thinks she is, symbolic of the downward-spiralling vortex of emotion that has him "falling" in love with what is, essentially, a nonentity. “Falling” is a thread that runs through the entire movie; in his nightmares Scottie, who suffers from vertigo, is always seen falling. Early shots depict his fear of heights. Hitchcock shows us this fear from Scottie’s point of view: by zooming the lens in, while simultaneously pulling the camera back, Hitchcock's shot depicts walls—or a building, a staircase or a street below—approaching and receding at the same time. In cinema terms, this shot conveys, I would imagine, the dizziness, the nausea, that sufferers of vertigo experience.

When VERTIGO was released, Kim Novak, who plays “Madeleine”—the dream object of Stewart’s desire---was ridiculed for playing the role robotically, without emotion. But time has proved Novak right: her character, after all, was a role another man was paying her to portray. Therefore, the way she moves—and you might call it “stiffly”—is exactly how many, if not most, would move if they were trying to project a persona not their own.

If you see VERTIGO, make sure you get the remastered edition. The original print had faded much over the years until Universal Studios, using an expensive and painstaking process, restored it to the way Master Hitchcock intended it to be seen.

--Hoyt Harris