Don't get me wrong. Vertigo has a lot going for it. It has wonderful cinematography showing off San Francisco's unique vistas. It has possibly the best film score ever written, by Bernard Herrmann. And it boasts two iconic stars, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, giving the best performances of their careers. It's a good film, a very good one. But it isn't the best and shouldn't even crack the top 100.
Let's face it. There are a couple of things about this film that are downright silly. The biggest howler is when Stewart's Scottie Ferguson pulls that "Oh, I just had to take your wet clothes off while you were unconscious" thing after Kim Novak throws herself into the San Francisco Bay, and Novak reacts with a moment of trepidation to preserve her modesty before settling into a bemused acceptance. Let's examine how this moment would play out in real life:
Novak: Where are my...
Stewart: Oh, I'm sorry. Your clothes were all wet and I put them by the fire...
Novak: You took my clothes off?! Who are you? Where am I?
Stewart: Now Miss, Miss, just a minute.
Novak: Help! Police! Police!
Stewart: Shhh! Quiet! You'll alert the neighbors. It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
Novak: Help!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This "comedic" predicament had played out in many films before, such as in 1932's Hot Saturday, with Randolph Scott and Nancy Carroll playing the lothario with few senses of boundaries and the very accommodating ingenue, respectively. I imagine this was hackneyed in 1932, and by 1958 it's just clumsy and old-fashioned. It's just not believable that Novak's character would choose this way to rope him in. There's no way she keeps a straight face through it all.
Then there's Scottie's psychedelic nightmare sequence in the middle of the film. This didn't work much better for Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Filmmakers, don't try to recreate psychedelic mind trips in a two dimensional space like film. Just don't.
Those two issues aside, there are other problems with the film. Whereas first half was slow and intriguing, the second half was just slow. The spark and mystery between Stewart and Novak were gone and all we were left with were two people groping in a bad situation they couldn't get out of. It's the stuff taut thrillers are made of, but this was not taut. And Novak's makeup and hair as Judy, with her exaggerated eyebrows and kiss curls over her forehead, just looks awkward. It's the one sequence where her performance falters, possibly because she looks so silly.
Things pick up eventually with the makeover and Scottie turning more frenzied, and it all culminates in a suitably tragic ending that served the preceding film well. That said, this isn't as deep a film as it has been made out to be. Much has been made about Hitchcock's obsessions with his blonde leading ladies and how this film is a barely disguised subtext of that, but let's not let our self regard at recognizing this inflate the film's psychological depth beyond what it deserves. It's a film about a man's obsession. What produces the obsession, we don't really know, so it's not very revelatory. We're meant to live through these characters and wonder, "What if?" Like any good mystery.
Is it art? It's paced like art, but it doesn't transcend its genre. It merely exemplifies it. Besides giving critics an excuse to ruminate about psychosexual issues they know little about in a ponderously pretentious manner, it's also possible the film's reputation is so inflated because it was out of circulation for a decade, from the early '70s to early '80s. Perhaps too much non-critical legend building went on then, and coupled with the fact that it wasn't very successful in its first run, well, you have all the ingredients for a self-congratulatory, contrarian revival. I'm just not buying it. It's very good, hypnotizing at times, but there are too many problems to allow it to be placed among the all-time greatest.
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