Day 8: January 10th, 2014: Vertigo (1958) - Alfred Hitchcock

I’m going to start this review by stating that I made the mistake of seeing two films last night, American Hustle at 8pm and then this film, Vertigo, at 11pm. Turns out double features are more tiring than they look? Especially since I haven’t stayed up past midnight in a while, I was kind of hold holding my eyes open like this:

So Vertigo is a film I was very excited to watch, but unfortunately I think my tiredness left me a little unprepared to really watch the film as the classic that it has become. Vertigo is a Hitchcock film about a man named Scottie who is forced to retire from the police after a tragic accident left a policeman dead and left Scottie with a crippling fear of heights. Oh… and vertigo, a sensation of false, rotational movement. See Liza Minnelli as example:

Scottie is then hired by his old friend Gavin Elster, who believes that his wife, Madeleine, is being possessed and should be followed. Scottie reluctantly agrees, and finds that Madeleine is in fact up to a lot of weird stuff.

After Madeleine falls in the San Francisco Bay and Scottie saves her, the two start to develop feelings for each other. And then shit hits the fan! I don’t want to give away the ending but let’s just say there is a decent level of drama. Not to mention the film also popularized the dolly zoom, which is now known as the Vertigo Effect.

But Vertigo wasn’t always the masterpiece of cinema that it is known as today. In the 50s, it barely had any mention in scholarly articles about film. It wasn’t until the late 60s that it started getting attention from film critics, and all of the sudden it was heralded as one of the greatest films of all time. It is number #9 in the AFI 100 Movies list, and #66 on the IMDb Top 250, but it recently made #1 (beating out Citizen Kane) on the Sight & Sound list.

Most of the critics’ main problem with the film at the time was that it was too slow to be considered a psychological murder/suspense film. And I can attest to that, because sometimes I felt like I was begging for something crazy to happen.

And when things did happen, they felt a little overacted and cheap. Especially in regards to Scottie’s fear of heights.

But a film as critically praised as this one can’t be judged after only one viewing, so I’m not going to pass judgment here. Let’s just say I was less than thrilled to be watching this thriller, but the whole time I kept telling myself that this wasn’t the last I would be seeing of Madeleine.