334. Vertigo (1958)

Directed By Alfred Hitchcock

Synopsis

Jimmy Stewart is so afraid of heights that he quits the police force. A man then hires him to follow his wife which is seemingly possessed by the spirit of an ancestor...

Review

If the synopsis is incomplete it is because anything else would really ruin the film, well maybe not ruin because it is such a great film, but at least diminish the impact for those who don't know the story.

This is one of the best films by Hitchcock we've had on the list and also one of the strangest ones. Jimmy Stewart is particularly good in this and he is very well used by Hitchcock, no one expects to see Jimmy become a ruthless self-obsessed asshole, but for a while in the film he does become that.

The ending of the film is also one of those great endings in cinema which make you titter with a nervous giggle at the unexpectedness and awesomeness of it. This is a film that does not end well... lets say. Then there is some great innovative camera work, form the depictions of vertigo to the representation of San Francisco. A truly great film.

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

In the 1960s, the French Cahiers du cinéma critics began re-evaluating Hitchcock as a serious artist rather than just a populist showman. However, even François Truffaut's important book of Hitchcock interviews mentions Vertigo very little. Dan Aulier has suggested that the real beginning of Vertigo's rise in adulation was the British-Canadian scholar Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films (1968), which calls the film "Hitchcock's masterpiece to date and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us". Adding to its mystique was the fact that Vertigo was one of five films owned by the Hitchcock estate that was removed from circulation in 1973. When Vertigo was re-released in theaters in October 1983, and then on home video in October 1984, it achieved an impressive commercial success and laudatory reviews. Similarly adulatory reviews were written for the October 1996 of a restored print in 70mm and DTS sound at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.

In 1989, Vertigo was recognized as a "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" film by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, going in the first year of the registry's voting.

The film ranked 4th and 2nd respectively in Sight and Sound's poll of the best films ever made, in 1992 and 2002 respectively. In 2005, Vertigo came in second (to Goodfellas) in British magazine Total Film's book, 100 Greatest Movies of All Time.

In his book Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, however, British film critic Tom Shone argued that Vertigo's critical re-evaluation has led to excessive praise, and argued for a more measured response. Faulting Sight and Sound for "perennially" putting the film on the list of best-ever films, he wrote that "Hitchcock is a director who delights in getting his plot mechanisms buffed up to a nice humming shine, and so the Sight and Sound team praise the one film of his in which this is not the case – it's all loose ends and lopsided angles, its plumbing out on display for the critic to pick over at his leisure."

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