#Vertigo hitchcock movie

“Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you exactly what to do, what to say?” “Did he train you,” he rants when he realises he’s been tricked. Rather, she is playing a role which was written for her by Scottie’s pal Elster – and that’s the aspect of the con which upsets Scottie the most.

What’s unusual about his predicament is that Judy that doesn’t use her own feminine wiles to seduce him. All the time he is stalking Madeleine – or the woman he presumes is Madeleine – he isn’t a svengali but a stooge: a lovelorn dupe who is being suckered by a beautiful femme fatale, just like the hapless heroes of so many film noirs before him. To focus solely on the idea that Scottie embodies all of Hitchcock’s control-freak tendencies is to overlook the fact that Scottie is being controlled, too. Vertigo has become a key text in the prehistory of the #MeToo movement.īut that’s not the only facet of the film that is weirdly contemporary, six decades after its premiere. In the past year, since Harvey Weinstein’s alleged crimes against women were brought to light, we’ve had to think harder about the sexist bullying perpetrated by Hitchcock and his peers. And while this has always been one source of the film’s fascination, it’s an even bigger factor now. But the makeover scenes have led to Vertigo being described as Hitchcock’s ‘confessional’ (to borrow Roger Ebert’s word): his brazen acknowledgement that he tried to mould every actress he hired into an ideal ‘Hitchcock blonde’. When you watch Vertigo in the age of the internet, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, it resonates as loudly as a church bell.Īll clear? Probably not.

#Vertigo hitchcock movie

It’s not one of those films which predict the future, and it’s not a science-fiction movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it was certainly way ahead of its time. The film cursed for decades is finally hereĪnother reason why Vertigo now towers over the competition is that its themes have become ever more relevant. Why 2001 is one of the strangest films ever made You can see why it frustrated viewers who were in the mood for a Jimmy Stewart adventure yarn in 1958. Two women die horribly, the hero’s sanity is shattered, and there is no indication that the urbane villain will be punished. In a canon not short of gruesome murders and cruel betrayals, Vertigo stands out as Hitchcock’s most mercilessly bleak work. Why has its reputation climbed to such dizzying heights? One obvious reason is that the film drips with the kind of toxic cynicism which appeals to critics in retrospect more than it does to Saturday-night cinema-goers. By 1992, it had crept up to fourth place by 2002 it was second only to Citizen Kane and in 2012 Vertigo overtook Orson Welles’ masterpiece to take the top spot. In the critics’ poll conducted once a decade by Sight and Sound magazine, Vertigo was ranked, in 1982, as the seventh best film ever made.

But few failures have gone on to be so successful. Alfred Hitchcock’s mind-bending mystery wasn’t a critical or commercial hit when it was released 60 years ago, and in an interview with Francois Truffaut in 1962, Hitchcock himself classed it as “a failure”. Laid up with a broken leg, James Stewart becomes the ultimate armchair detective in the best of his three previous Hitchcock collaborations, Rear Window (1954).Vertigo gets better with age. A thriller of dreamlike allure, it’s whipped to dizzying heights by Bernard Herrmann’s Wagner-influenced score. Though Hitchcock was originally deemed to have erred in giving away the film’s plot twist halfway through, Vertigo succeeds as a hallucinatory fable about the traps of desire. The story of acrophobic Scottie Ferguson (brilliantly played by James Stewart), who compulsively remodels Judy Barton (Kim Novak) in the image of his dead love Madeleine Elster (also Novak), is unflinchingly dark and tragic. Its reputation has since grown and it is now widely regarded as Hitchcock’s finest film, a haunting examination of male desire memorably filmed in real San Francisco locations. This classic from the master of suspense was so poorly received upon release that Alfred Hitchcock later withdrew it from distribution for several years. “If Vertigo remains, unchallengeably, Hitchcock’s masterpiece, this is surely because there the attitude to the unknown and mysterious is not simply one of terror but retains, implicitly, a profound and disturbing ambivalence.”