Vertigo Hold

My recent viewings of Rear Window and Psycho had at least one of you readers wondering which Alfred Hitchcock classic I'd check out next. The answer is Vertigo. Unfortunately, this broke the chain for me -- I didn't like the movie one bit.

In turned out that Vertigo was not a suspense movie or thriller at all; it's a love story. The meat of the plot is James Stewart's retired police character falling in love with a woman he's hired to shadow. Okay, I can respect a director wanting to shake things up and not be pigeonholed into making one kind of movie. If Hitchcock wanted to make a love story, I have no issue there.

But he didn't make a good love story. The first act starts out on another path, as though we are indeed watching a thriller or mystery. There's even a thread of the possible supernatural in it; is the woman actually being possessed by a ghost and walked around town like a puppet? But all that soon gives way to an incredibly slow-paced courtship. We get long walks, marveling at tree rings, all manner of boredom before finally, something of substance happens again...

Spoiler alert if you've not seen it... skip the next paragraph.

...the woman dies. Then the mystery aspect of the film tries to reassert itself. Except that it's been gone too long, all the momentum is lost. And worse, the tension is released again almost immediately when it's revealed to the audience that the death was staged, and the woman James Stewart fell in love with is still alive, pretending to be someone else. Now we're going to spend the rest of the movie waiting (more waiting?!) for his character to catch up with us.

In the final act, the movie's age really starts to show, as the main character indulges in overt chauvinism. He manhandles the new woman in his life, figuratively and sometimes literally, forcing her into a makeover to turn her into someone else, the woman he wants to be with. And she weakly submits in the hopes of continuing a relationship with him. By the end of it all, I found both characters thoroughly distasteful, and wasn't at all moved by the supposedly haunting finale.

But Vertigo is not wholly without redeeming qualities. There are two aspects of it which I feel worthy of note. First is the tremendous music of Bernard Herrmann. It thrills, it sweeps, it stirs. This was not the composer's only genius score, but it was one of his best.

Then there's the famous (and infamous) camera work of Irmin Roberts, the man who invented a technique so distinct and famous, it was named for this movie: the "dolly out, zoom in" or "Vertigo zoom." Today, it's impossible to imagine film without it, that impossible visual distortion of things changing size in the background as the objects (usually characters) in the foreground remain the same size. There have been a lot of hacks over the last half century who have lifted the technique only to sully it into cliche, but it has also been used in iconic moments from Jaws, Apollo 13, oh... more good movies than I could possibly list. And it all started here, with a genius who thought of a technical way to convey on film the emotional state of one's world shifting.

For these two contributions alone, I can grade Vertigo a full mark higher than I otherwise would. But I have to say, I would otherwise put it at the rock bottom. Overall, Vertigo gets a D from me. I still have had more good Hitchcock experiences than bad, so I expect I'll be catching another of his famous films that has slipped by my radar. But this has put the brakes on. I'll probably wait a while longer than I did for these last few.