Vertigo (1958) – Review

Preserving the secret of a film that’s armed itself with devastating twist is becoming something of a lost art. Be it through careless posting on the internet to good old word of mouth, how many people these days approach older movies such as Se7en, The Sixth Sense, or Soylent Green without already knowing how the damn films end.
So, imagine my luck when I managed to settle down and belatedly watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo with almost no clue of the plot thanks to a mixture of an atrocious memory and the fact that my cinematic knowledge had some embarrassing holes in it.
Oh, I’m sure I was aware of Hitch’s devastating denouement as some part of my life (which was probably why I’d dragged my heels so long when it came to actually watching it), but after finally coming out the other end, I’d come to one inescapable conclusion. Vertigo may be Hitchcock’s most quitely ruthless movie of all.

After a rooftop chase that ends with disastrous consequences, San Francisco detective John Ferguson is forced to retire after the traumatic event of dangling multiple stories above the ground as a poor officer plunged to his death has left him with crippling acrophobia and vertigo. While even the slightest hint of height has John swooning like a damsel in a silent movie, he tries to get back on the horse by becoming a private detective and swapping casual banter with his ex-fiancee and current good friend Midge.
However, a fateful die is cast when John is approached by an old acquaintance from college, Gavin Elster, who has a job for him concerning his wife, Madeleine, who has been displaying some rather strange behavior of late. It seems she has taken to disappearing for hours on end while drifting into a fugue state, only reappear at the end of the day with no memory of where she’s been and Gavin tasks his old buddy to try and find out.
So after a day tracking Madeleine all over the place, and intrigued John manages to discern patterns to her wandering behavior and after witnessing her stop at an old grave labelled Carlotte Valdes, she heads to an art gallery to stare blanky at a portrait of the dead woman. However, the plot thickens even further when it turns that that this Carlotte not only committed suicide in 1857, but she’s actually Madeleine’s grandmother, even though the troubled woman is unaware of that fact.
Matters get even more serious when John witness Madeleine throw herself into the San Francisco bay and finally breaks cover to save her life. By this point, thanks to the strange nature of the mystery and his own vunerable state, the traumatised John has fallen utterly in love with the woman and vows to save her. But save her from what, exactly? Is she merely in the midst of some psychotic episode or is she really being possessed by her grandmother? Well guess what, this is only the tip of a screwed up iceberg.

It’s pretty ironic that I opened this review with a diatribe concerning the wanton spilling of movie secrets, but in order to properly delve into the true nitty gritty of possibly Hitchcock’s most celebrated movie, I’m going to have to do the same and blow the lid off the whole shebang. So, with a very loud SPOILER WARNING in effect, I’m going to do just that.
Possibly Hitchcock’s most controlled rug pull of his entire existence, the secret behind letting Vertigo burrow into your brain and live there rent free, is patience; because the director is certainly in no hurry to get to the real meat of the story and while it turns out that this movie is stuffed full of lies and deceit, the biggest trick is actually being played on you, the viewer. After starting the film in the middle of a frenzied, rooftop chase that gives our hero his titular malady, Hitchcock slams on the breaks, turning what is billed as a mind melting thriller into a surprisingly languid noir as an increasingly concerned and obsessed James Stewart tails Kim Novak’s living, breathing rubik’s cube for the best part of the first third. While this leads to endless scenes of people in car driving after people at a respectable distance and a slow drip, drip, drip of clues and character, the pace – especially if compared to modern tastes – could be even be described as…. dull?
Ah-HA! But don’t you see, Hitch has already fooled you! Because while the mollusc-like pace is extraordinarily handy for laying out both the complicated characters and the complex set-up, it’s all one big red herring that ultimately reveals everything you’ve just been patiently sitting through is nothing more that an elaborate farce. What begins as a case of a tragic love story of mental illness that sees a woman convinced she’s being possessed and who ultimately commits suicide by throwing herself out of a tower; soon becomes a sordid tale of deceit that grabs you by the throat and hurls you into the creepily unpredictable second half that sees our tormented hero rendered all but catatonic by seeing yet another person fall to their doom. From here, both Hitch and Stewart portray Ferguson as a broken man, wryly playing with 50s concepts of masculinity who goes from a tormented defender of truth to a shadow of his former self who suddenly becomes obsessed with a woman named Judy Barton, who bears a striking resemblance to the tragic Madeleine for a very good reason. And from here, the fiendish director starts screwing with the concepts with good and bad with such ferocity, all you can do is desperately hold on and try to enjoy the ride. Stewart is magnificent as he shifts from his usual, amiable self into a haunted wreck, who takes this woman and slowly molds her into an exact double of his beloved, tragic, Madeleine.

It manages to pull off the trick of being impressively restrained and classy, but simultaneously being incredibly sordid and creepy at the same time – but things don’t end there. In one final sting in the tale (and I’d stop reading NOW if you haven’t seen the film) it turns out that John was never in love with Madeleine, and was, in fact, in love with Judy all along because she was hired to double the doomed woman while her husband, Giles, was engineering her death to look like that elaborate suicide. Stuck in a position where the man she’s genuinely fallen for is making her up to look like a woman hes obsessed with who was really her all along maybe one of the most ballsiest movies in the history of psychological thriller.
Essentially a ghost story without a ghost, not only does Hitch excel himself with twists even more audacious than ones seen in Psycho, but he manages to pulls it off with only four major characters, two of which – Stewart and Novak, take a bow – put in the performances of their lives.
Impressively effed up, yet magnificently refined, a whole other article could be written about the use of angles, lighting and camers movements that foreshadow such a devastating structural turn, but I’ve peeled back the layers of Vertigo’s genius way too much already. And I haven’t even touched on the splendiferous, phantasmagorical dream sequence and the famous bending of perspective that signifies John’s panic.

Hitchcock’s best? Well, that’s certainly a matter of opinion, but it’s definately up there and it’s a shocking, bruising example that you don’t need violence and profanity to tell a love story between two very messed up people.
If you disagree that this film hits the dizzying heights, then you can Vertigo to hell….

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟