The real shame of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo, is that it can only be seen for the first time once. Of course that’s true of all films, but I can think of no other movie that has the power of this one to hold a viewer in a true state of macabre wonder and obsession as this one does on first viewing. Hitchcock, is of course, the master manipulator of cinema, and this strange, disorienting story of a man (Jimmy Stewart) becoming obsessed with an unearthly beautiful woman (Kim Novak) who is seemingly coming under the possession of a dead woman is told with such a compelling and deft technique that the viewer is nearly driven as mad as the man who is desperately trying to solve her mystery.
Hitchcock here utilizes everything he has learned in a lifetime of a personalized vision of cinematic identification to pull the viewer, slowly, deeply and irrevocably into this impossible maelstrom of confusion and disorder. There is no character in movie history as completely controlled and haunted as Stewart’s "Scotty" Fergesun, a retired detective recruited by an old college friend to follow and spy on his beautiful wife, Madeline. No movie exercises more complete control over a viewer, as Hitchcock employs long sequences of Scotty following Madeline around San Francisco, which becomes a character in itself in the film, its winding streets mirroring the mounting confusion and chaos inside his mind, its stunning monuments standing out like visions in a haunted nightmare.
The richly saturated color of the film is probably the greatest use of Technicolor in history (especially in the restored edition), with its strategies of greens against browns and greys, as well as the powerful use of red at precise moments to heighten tension. This may be the most voluptuously beautiful movie ever filmed. Likewise the score, by the legendary Bernard Herrmann, is probably the most lavishly seductive sustained piece of music in any movie. (When the music ceases after Scotty’s breakdown and he wanders the streets alone, the film abandons him to a strange limbo state where you can "hear" his broken isolation.)
Some people will always criticize Hitchcock’s decision to give away the mystery at the point that he does, but it is the correct move all the way. Once the viewer is armed with the knowledge that Scotty does not possess, his every move becomes more and more transparent, and we squirm watching a man with which we have identified for so long descending further and further into obsessive madness, and we want to scream at the characters to make them stop what they’re doing.
But there is no point. These people are doomed. Hitchcock makes very, very clear the price one may have to pay for projecting an idealistic fantasy on a real flesh-and-blood human being, and he makes us suffer and pay for it, the way that his characters do. Like all great Hitchcock, this is a powerfully moral film, and while its cautionary message is sincere, the compulsive world that the director has so carefully devised leaves absolutely no room for escape. Scotty has to go up those stairs, and we are pushing him with every step. Once we do, we all get what we deserve.
Of course, the most amazing thing is that we continue to make the same mistakes every time we watch the film. Even after we know better. Now that’s cinematic mastery!
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