There are classic movies that were unappreciated in their time, that took years or even decades to come into their own. “It’s A Wonderful Life” was a flop until it turned up on TV every Christmas. “Duck Soup” was a Marx Brothers bomb until the counterculture kids discovered it in the 1960s.
And then there’s “Vertigo,” whose journey has been unlike any other in the canon. Once dismissed as a qualified misfire that narrowly broke even at the box office and won two “lesser” Oscars (for production design and sound mixing), Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 suspense thriller continues to blossom into fresh relevance with each new generation of film lovers. At the same time, this is the Great Movie that most daunts a casual viewer, especially since 2012, when “Vertigo” knocked “Citizen Kane” out of a half-century in the top spot on Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade poll of the best films of all time. That’s a heavy load to carry for an odd, dreamlike movie that doesn’t seem to care about meeting an audience halfway and that only becomes richer, sadder and more profound with multiple viewings.
“Vertigo” turns 65 this month — the movie premiered in San Francisco on May 9, 1958 — and now that it’s eligible for Medicare, it’s time to take stock. (Further prompting a reconsideration is a planned remake starring Robert Downey Jr., still in the early stages.) So: Is this the greatest film of all time (or second greatest, as of the 2022 Sight and Sound poll) — or is it a lugubrious bore? Is it a director’s darkest confession or just another Hitchcock mousetrap? A misogynistic tract or a portrait of toxic male obsession decades ahead of its time?
You can find an argument for every one of those opinions somewhere on the internet and probably in a straw poll once the lights come up at a revival house screening of “Vertigo.” What is it about this one movie that’s so divisive — that can prompt tears of wrung-out emotion in one person and annoyed shrugs in another?
Part of the problem (if you want to call it that) has to do not with what “Vertigo” is but what it isn’t. It isn’t “Rear Window” — or “North By Northwest,” or “Strangers on a Train” or any of the fiendishly constructed entertainments that still make audiences happy to have Hitchcock “put them through it.” Instead, “Vertigo” is probably the master’s single weirdest movie. (All votes for “Marnie” will be counted.) It’s oddly shaped — unconventional, even off-putting, with those maddeningly aimless driving scenes around San Francisco and the mystery given away at the two-thirds mark. If the structural radicalism of “Psycho” — the main character killed off before the movie’s even half over — only heightened its effectiveness and commercial appeal, the ungainly narrative form of “Vertigo” makes it a challenge for audiences seeking an uncomplicated good time.
Yet that form is necessary to the great trick Hitchcock plays on audiences, which may be another reason for the resentment. For much of its 128 minutes, “Vertigo” pretends to be at least two different movies than the one it is. It’s not a ghost story. It’s not even a murder mystery. It’s a tragedy — a cinematic opera — about a man so in love with the woman in his head that he can’t see the woman in his arms. It’s a movie about the ways we try to mold the people we love into the people who never loved us back.
“Vertigo” — warning: spoilers ensue — tells the story of John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart), a retired police detective with a fear of heights. Hired to follow an old friend’s wife, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), seemingly suicidal and possessed by the spirit of her ancestor, Scottie finds himself hopelessly in love but helpless to intervene when Madeleine throws herself off the top of a bell tower. A year later and still grieving, Scottie meets Judy Barton (Novak) and becomes obsessed with making her over in Madeleine’s image, buying her the same clothes Madeleine wore and convincing her to dye her hair blonde. We learn that Judy actually was Madeleine — or pretended to be her, as an unwitting pawn in the friend’s plot to kill his wife. When Scottie discovers the truth, he angrily drags Judy back to the bell tower, where his vertigo is cured but she falls to her death.
That ending especially — Scottie alone on the precipice, Bernard Herrmann’s score crashing around him like storm waves — can remain stuck in one viewer’s soul and another viewer’s craw. It’s the darkest ending in all of Hitchcock, and one of the darkest of the studio era. It underscores the uncomfortable realization that the detective’s not just the hero of this movie, nor is he just the victim. He’s the victimizer, too. He’s the monster.
I’d argue this has become clearer over the decades, as critical terms like “the male gaze” have leached into the public conversation and as a younger generation of women has been more forthright in sharing the details of gaslighting, emotional abuse and other toxic partner behaviors. For decades “Vertigo” was a movie about Jimmy Stewart, but, fascinatingly, over time it has also become a movie about Kim Novak — about a Judy who wants to be seen and loved for herself, while her lover sees in her only the woman he lost. The Guardian’s Anne Billson was right in a 2018 article that cited the character’s anguished plea upon being asked to dye her hair — “If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?” — as one of the most heartbreaking lines in the history of the movies.
That it’s Scottie’s tragedy, too, is only because Stewart is playing him. Anyone else might have made the part unbearably cruel. But the beloved actor, who since his return from World War II combat had consciously sought grittier roles, understood the gulf between his own youthful persona and the unfathomable bitterness with which Scottie tells Judy, “You shouldn’t have been that sentimental.” One reason “Vertigo” seems so terribly sad to some of us is that we see right through Scottie to the sweet, lost Jimmy of a more innocent era.
(And what of Marjorie “Midge” Wood, Scottie’s onetime fiancee and, as warmly and wisely portrayed by Barbara Bel Geddes, the movie’s reality principle? Poor Midge. Poor us. When she walks out of “Vertigo” at the midway point, after Scottie has had a breakdown in the wake of Madeleine’s death and Midge realizes she’s lost him, she maroons the audience inside Scottie’s fever-green fantasy world. And with Bel Geddes’s warmth vanishing from the film, Stewart seems colder than ever.)
All of these are buried ideas, arguable as to whether Hitch or Stewart or anyone consciously put them there. That’s why movies are art, not architecture, despite Hitchcock’s meticulous storyboard blueprints. What’s unarguable is that while much of “Vertigo” remains rooted in 1958, other aspects speak more painfully and truthfully of human behavior than even its creators might have imagined.
To be discomfited by this movie — its method and its message — was, I think, always part of the game plan. To resist it still may betray an unwillingness to grapple with what it says about men, women and the wounds people inflict on each other in the name of love. Two-thirds of a century after it was made, “Vertigo” still dares you to watch it not with your head but with your heart.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.substack.com.
