VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Alfred Hitchcock made four films with Jimmy Stewart. Sadly, I hadn’t seen any of them, so I watched the first two, Rope and Rear Window, last year. I especially enjoyed the latter on the big screen thanks to the local movie house’s Tuesday Classics series. I went to that theater again last night to see the fourth and final collaboration, the highly regarded Vertigo (this leaves me The Man Who Knew Too Much).

First, I want to praise the lush visuals the film offers, from psychedelic dream sequences to haunting night scenes in the redwood forest, not to mention the countless shots of the late 1950’s wonderland that was San Francisco. Also glorious to see in large were the amazing costumes by Edith Head. Secondly, there is the iconic score by Bernard Hermann, one of the best from one of the best. Hearing it fill a large space was a delight. I can easily understand why this film has endured for almost 70 years.

That being said, while I found the plot to be refreshingly dark, I thought it suffered from the weight of it’s infatuation with the early fashion of psychoanalysis. Like Marnie or Psycho or…we are once again introduced to characters exhibiting the debilitating effects of trauma. In a theme that reminded me of Marnie (1964), Hitchcock shows that the successful treatment of women involved speaking loudly to them, shaking them a little, and exhorting them to “Remember! Try to remember!” whereas for the gentlemen, the process requires those same women to suffer. Sure, Jimmy Stewart gets over his fear of heights but two women have to die getting there. I thought Mr. Stewart’s character much more likable in Rear Window, even if he was a weak bitch at key moments, but here he just seems angry and disturbed. As Hitchcock explained to François Truffaut “To put it plainly, the man wants to go to bed with a woman who is dead.”