vertigo movie review

“Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you what to do and what to say?”

This cry from a wounded heart comes at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” and by the time it comes we are completely in sympathy. A man has fallen in love with a woman who does not exist, and now he cries out harshly against the real woman who impersonated her. But there is so much more to it than that. The real woman has fallen in love with him. In tricking him, she tricked herself. And the man, by preferring his dream to the woman standing before him, has lost both.

Then there is another level, beneath all of the others. Alfred Hitchcock was known as the most controlling of directors, particularly when it came to women. The female characters in his films reflected the same qualities over and over again: They were blond. They were icy and remote. They were imprisoned in costumes that subtly combined fashion with fetishism. They mesmerized the men, who often had physical or psychological handicaps. Sooner or later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated.

“Vertigo” (1958), which is one of the two or three best films Hitchcock ever made, is the most confessional, dealing directly with the themes that controlled his art. It is *about* how Hitchcock used, feared and tried to control women. He is represented by Scottie ( James Stewart ), a man with physical and mental weaknesses (back problems, fear of heights), who falls obsessively in love with the image of a woman–and not any woman, but the quintessential Hitchcock woman. When he cannot have her, he finds another woman and tries to mold her, dress her, train her, change her makeup and her hair, until she looks like the woman he desires. He cares nothing about the clay he is shaping; he will gladly sacrifice her on the altar of his dreams.

But of course the woman he is shaping and the woman he desires are the same person. Her name is Judy ( Kim Novak ), and she was hired to play the dream woman, “Madeleine,” as part of a murder plot that Scottie does not even begin to suspect. When he finds out he was tricked, his rage is uncontrollable. He screams out the words: “Did he train you? . . .” Each syllable is a knife in his heart, as he spells out that another man shaped the woman that Scottie thought to shape for himself. The other man has taken not merely Scottie’s woman, but Scottie’s dream.

That creates a moral paradox at the center of “Vertigo.” The other man (Gavin, played by Tom Helmore) has after all only done to this woman what Scottie also wanted to do. And while the process was happening, the real woman, Judy, transferred her allegiance from Gavin to Scottie, and by the end was not playing her role for money, but as a sacrifice for love.

All of these emotional threads come together in the greatest single shot in all of Hitchcock. Scottie, a former San Francisco police detective hired by Gavin to follow “Madeleine,” has become obsessed with her. Then it appears Madeleine has died. By chance, Scottie encounters Judy, who looks uncannily like Madeleine, but appears to be a more carnal, less polished version. Of course he does not realize she is exactly the same woman. He asks her out and Judy unwisely accepts. During their strange, stilted courtship, she begins to pity and care for him, so that when he asks her to remake herself into Madeleine, she agrees, playing the same role the second time.

The great scene takes place in a hotel room, lit by a neon sign. Judy has arrived, not looking enough like Madeleine to satisfy Scottie, who wants her in the *same* dress, with the *same* hair. His eyes burn with zealous fixation. Judy realizes that Scottie is indifferent to her as a person and sees her as an object. Because she loves him, she accepts this. She locks herself into the bathroom, does the makeover, opens the door and walks toward Scottie out of a haunting green fog that is apparently explained by the neon sign, but is in fact a dreamlike effect.

As Hitchcock cuts back and forth between Novak’s face (showing such pain, such sorrow, such a will to please) and Stewart’s (in a rapture of lust and gratified control), we feel hearts being torn apart: They are both slaves of an image fabricated by a man who is not even in the room–Gavin, who created “Madeleine” as a device to allow himself to get away with the murder of his wife.

As Scottie embraces “Madeleine,” even the background changes to reflect his subjective memories instead of the real room he’s in. Bernard Herrmann’s score creates a haunting, unsettled yearning. And the camera circles them hopelessly, like the pinwheel images in Scottie’s nightmares, until the shot is about the dizzying futility of our human desires, the impossibility of forcing life to make us happy. This shot, in its psychological, artistic and technical complexity, may be the one time in his entire career that Alfred Hitchcock completely revealed himself, in all of his passion and sadness. (Is it a coincidence that the woman is named Madeleine–the word for the French biscuit, which, in Proust, brings childhood memories of loss and longing flooding back?)

Alfred Hitchcock took universal emotions, like fear, guilt and lust, placed them in ordinary characters, and developed them in images more than in words. His most frequent character, an innocent man wrongly accused, inspired much deeper identification than the superficial supermen in today’s action movies.

He was a great visual stylist in two ways: He used obvious images and surrounded them with a subtle context. Consider the obvious ways he suggests James Stewart’s vertigo. An opening shot shows him teetering on a ladder, looking down at a street below. Flashbacks show why he left the police force. A bell tower at a mission terrifies him, and Hitchcock creates a famous shot to show his point of view: Using a model of the inside of the tower, and zooming the lens in while at the same time physically pulling the camera back, Hitchcock shows the walls approaching and receding at the same time; the space has the logic of a nightmare. But then notice less obvious ways that the movie sneaks in the concept of falling, as when Scottie drives down San Francisco’s hills, but never up. And note how truly he “falls” in love.

There is another element, rarely commented on, that makes “Vertigo” a great film. From the moment we are let in on the secret, the movie is equally about Judy: her pain, her loss, the trap she’s in. Hitchcock so cleverly manipulates the story that when the two characters climb up that mission tower, we identify with both of them, and fear for both of them, and in a way Judy is less guilty than Scottie.

The danger is to see Judy, played by Novak, as an object in the same way that Scottie sees her. She is in fact one of the most sympathetic female characters in all of Hitchcock.

Over and over in his films, Hitchcock took delight in literally and figuratively dragging his women through the mud–humiliating them, spoiling their hair and clothes as if lashing at his own fetishes. Judy, in “Vertigo,” is the closest he came to sympathizing with the female victims of his plots. And Novak, criticized at the time for playing the character too stiffly, has made the correct acting choices: Ask yourself how you would move and speak if you were in unbearable pain, and then look again at Judy.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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‘vertigo’: thr’s 1958 review.

In May 1958, Paramount unveiled Alfred Hitchcock's thriller, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, in theaters.

By Jack Moffitt

Jack Moffitt

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In May 1958, Paramount unveiled Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in theaters. The James Stewart and Kim Novak thriller went on to nab two nominations, for art direction and sound, at the 31st Academy Awards. The Hollywood Reporter’s review, originally titled “‘Vertigo’ Fascinating Love Story Wrapped in Mystery,” is below: 

Alfred Hitchcock tops his own fabulous record for suspense with Vertigo , a super-tale of murder, madness and mysticism that stars James Stewart and Kim Novak. Aside from being big box office, it is a picture no filmmaker should miss if only to observe the pioneering techniques achieved by Hitchcock and his co-workers.

After a horrific fall from a tall building, a San Francisco detective (James Stewart) suffers a neurotic fear of heights and repeated attacks of vertigo. Retired from the force, he is persuaded by a wealthy man (Tom Helmore) to investigate the strange behavior of his wife (Kim Novak). This weirdly lovely woman is believed to be a victim of demonic possession with the spirit of her mad great-grandmother periodically inhabiting her beautiful body. While studying this otherworldly creature, the detective begins to accept the outer forces that seem to dominate her and he falls deeply in love with her. Obeying what she says is an irresistible compulsion, they visit an Old Spanish mission. When she rushes to the top of the bell tower, he is prevented by his fear of heights from following and he sees her fall to her death.

But the story doesn’t end here. Filled with grief and a sense of guilt, the man becomes obsessed in a search to find or re-create the woman he has loved and lost. In woman after woman he, momentarily, sees a distant view of his beloved’s features. When approaching closer, he is disillusioned. Finally, in a harsh-voiced common shopgirl, with untidy hair and careless rainment, he catches an elusive echo of his dream woman.

Here, with superb film story telling, Hitchcock discloses to the audience the shop girl has been doubling for the wife from the start, that she was an accessory to the wife’s murder and that, while playing her criminal part in the wealthy husband’s conspiracy, she has fallen in love with the detective who was duped into being a witness to a faked accident. From here on, suspense hangs upon with the guilty girl can hold the affections of the infatuated man without reawakening his latent instincts as a cop. it would be unfair to disclose the final denouement.

Hitchcock tells three distinct types of story in this one picture without a moment of disharmony or audience confusion. The first part of the film is given a fascinating editorial tone of the supernatural. The second act is told from the point of view of the hero’s obsession; the finish is a bang-up straightaway love and detection story.

The measure of a great director lies in his ability to inspire his associates to rise above their usual competence and Hitchcock exhibits absolute genius in doing this in Vertigo. The animated spirals of Saul Bass’s title designs create an effect of dizziness and audience participation (more effective than 3-D) at the very start. Colored lights, filters and tinted printing (in Technicolor) put photographer Robert Burks at the top of his profession. In shot after shot, he makes commonplace scenes of San Francisco traffic seem spiritually macabre. Aided by Richard Mueller, the color consultant, he has equaled (and perhaps surpassed) South Pacific in his creation of dramatic mood by use of tinted lighting. John Ferren’s special sequence of Stewart’s nightmares is hair-raising.

Stewart gives what I consider the finest performance of his career as the detective. He portrays obsession to the point of mania without the least bit of it hamming or scenery chewing. Miss Novak has become a fine actress, especially in the latter part of the film where she appears as the love-possessed shop girl. Here, without the support of her ethereal beauty, she does a really fine bit of trouping. Wally Westmore’s makeups and Nellie Manley’s hair supervision are all important in making the spectator accept the masquerade and, at the proper moments, in keeping the audience guessing.

Barbara Bel Geddes comes into her own as a screen actress as Stewart’s humorous and lovable stand-by girlfriend. And Henry Jones makes much more of his role of a nastily sarcastic coroner. Tom Helmore is a smooth and plausible murderer; Ellen Corby and Konstantin Shayne shine in smaller parts.

The skill with which Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor constructed their screenplay from a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac proves two things — 1) that an audience will buy any startling change in human behavior if you give it time (with montages and subtle buildups) to believe the transitions and; 2) that a murder mystery can be the greatest form of emotional drama if one concentrates on the feelings of the characters rather than the plot mathematics. Coppel and Taylor have put together a mosaic without making it look like a jigsaw and amid much story legerdemain, they found time to provide Stewart and Miss Bel Geddes with some priceless bits of homey and funny dialogue.

Hal Pereira and Henry Bumstead give the production good down-to-earth scenic design (both in the studio and on locations in the Bay City) and the set decorations by Sam Comer and Frank McKelvy are good. Edith Head produces another of her masterpieces of costume characterization and film editor George Tomasini has used his splicer and movieola to achieve an orderly synthesis of three photographic styles. Bernard Herrmann’s music conducted by Muir Mathieson keeps the audience hovering with expectancy on the threshold of every thrill.

Vertigo is one of the most fascinating love stories ever filmed. — Jack Moffitt, originally published on May 12, 1958.

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“Vertigo”: The Search for a Cure

The mark of a classic is that it is an inexhaustible experience, a refutation of Einstein’s definition of madness: seeing a great movie or listening to a great piece of music over and over, one has reason to expect different results and one gets them. That’s one of the things that makes it a privilege and a delight to write about movies appearing in revival. So it is with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which played two weekends ago at IFC Center in its ongoing retrospective of his films. On the occasion of this new screening, we ran my my capsule review of it in the magazine again, and I’m grateful to the editors of New York magazine’s Approval Matrix for taking note of the piece in their current issue: “Brody boldly but delusionally states that Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ has a happy ending.”

I confess: I disagree with both adverbs. I don’t think there’s anything bold about calling the ending happy, especially since I hedge that so-called happiness within the very tight limits “of health restored and crime punished.” In those terms, it’s not delusional but merely lucid to say so—and the point is proved in the lovely still, from the end of the film, with which the Matrix illustrates the entry. Of course, to consider the film’s mortal conclusion truly and fully happy is a joke worthy of The New Yorker ’ s own Charles Addams , but it’s worth considering, in light of the jibe (despicable me), the tone of the movie’s ending, what it says about happiness according to Hitchcock, and how it reflects Hitchcock’s over-all sense of life, and, for that matter, of death. (I’m not going to worry about spoilers or about exposition, assuming that everyone has seen it.)

“Vertigo” is built on three parentheses that open at the start of the movie and close at its end:

• The suspicion of crime: The first shot of the movie is of a man being pursued by the police and chased over the rooftops of San Francisco by an officer and by a plainclothes detective (James Stewart), who misses his leap and is hanging onto a gutter for dear life. (The officer, attempting to help, falls to his death.)
• Mental illness: As the detective, John (Scottie) Ferguson, tells his erstwhile fiancé and good friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), “I have acrophobia, which gives me vertigo, and I get dizzy.”
• Sexual desire: Scottie’s rescue entailed physical trauma, which leaves him using a cane and bound in a corset that comes off just as he’s asked by a college friend, Gavin Elster, to do some detective work, which, of course, is a plot—the plot that sets the movie’s plot in motion. Scottie is asked to keep an eye on Elster’s wife—actually, of course, his mistress, who is dolled up to resemble his wife, and who impersonates someone in the grips of a mental illness that plays out like a family curse; her act (including her seduction of Scottie) is a part of Elster’s plan to murder his actual wife.

All three of these parentheses close at the end of the movie, with its crude and partial justice (a woman who is an accomplice to murder, albeit not its master plotter, ends up dead) and its psychological cure (Scottie loses his acrophobia and his vertigo). As for desire, the woman who dies is Scottie’s beloved, and with her death, his sexual desire—which made him an accomplice, albeit an unwitting one, to the same murder—vanishes into memory. As happy endings go, it’s an ironic one (and I’m surprised that my own shadow of irony went unnoticed), with its tragic contrast—one of an utterly classical pedigree—between the points of view of man and of God.

For Hitchcock, the merest stuff of existence brings inevitable punishment. To exist is to be punished, and, therefore, in God’s just universe, to be guilty—as in the movie that Hitchcock made just prior to “Vertigo,” “The Wrong Man,” in which the protagonist, though innocent of the crime of which he’s wrongly accused, is nonetheless guilty of something. (His appearance of guilt marks, rather, the sin of pride: the belief that one can guard against misfortune through good intentions and good planning). In “Vertigo,” Scottie is, first of all, guilty of not jumping as well as the regular police officer who preceded him across the abyss—the physical man who does his job modestly. Scottie is, rather, is a man out of a place, a lawyer who, dreaming of political power, holds a job for which he’s not quite physically apt. He’s also guilty of an immoderate lust—the plot runs on his old friend Elster’s accurate assumption that Scottie will be quite as turned on by Elster’s mistress as Elster is. (The answer is, more so: he’s so turned on by “Madeleine,” the simulacrum of Elster’s wife, that he doesn’t hesitate to cuckold his friend).

Like Hitchcock himself, Scottie is something of a fetishist; he’s turned on not just by her general beauty but by the particulars of her porcelain blondness and of her severe fashion. And like the viewer himself, Scottie is taken in by the melodramatic acting-out of gothic mumbo-jumbo about the curse of Carlotta Valdes. Kim Novak, as Madeleine, is delivering a terribly overblown performance of an absurd “script,” the one that Elster concocted to lure Scottie to the mission bell tower where the murder plot is to be put into action. In fact, Hitchcock is suggesting that Kim Novak isn’t much more of an actress than Judy Barton—that she even is, in effect, Judy Barton, a country girl who, under the guidance of a master manipulator such as Elster, gets roped into a plot to play platinum blonde and alabaster temptress, and that he himself is Elster, the behind-the-scenes plotter who ropes viewers in (and even turns them on) with a hokey plot and a country girl wearing a lot of makeup.

Lately I’ve written about filmmakers who consider that love and friendship are different things and who give priority to sexual desire as the basis for a relationship, and my prime example is Hitchcock (as in a scene from “Rear Window”). “Vertigo” provides an even sadder view of the same idea, in Scottie’s thwarted connection to Midge, a smart and capable woman who has everything Scottie needs but doesn’t turn him on. So, when Scottie is in the process of transforming the shopgirl Judy into the object of his desire and she implores him, “Couldn’t you like me, just me, the way I am?,” Scottie’s unspoken thought is, “I don’t like you; I like Midge, but I might love you.” The way she is isn’t anything special, not in Scottie’s world of accomplishments and interests. Judy doesn’t seem to have a better mind or more distinctive abilities or talents than the average young woman—she is the average young woman, but one who radiates a powerful, iridescent allure when she’s dressed the right way and made up the right way and when the light and Scottie’s eye (or the camera-eye) catch her the right way. That’s the strange truth about movie actors: the skill takes a back seat to grace, to a metaphysical gift. “Vertigo” is one of the great movies about movies, and about Hitchcock’s own way with them.

By the movie’s end, Scottie has seen behind Elster’s fourth wall no less surely than viewers have figured out that they’ve been had by Hitchcock’s narrative trickery, but neither Scottie nor viewers can get over the image of the false Madeleine into whom Judy was twice transformed, once by Elster and once by Scottie himself. The theatrical illusion remains an unshakeable reality, the eye remains an implacable engine of desire, but what the eye desires, penetrates, and is possessed by is the soul itself, the profoundest mystery of all. Without that mystery—without the sense that the eye is the gateway between two souls, the dam that bursts and breaks down the barrier between two souls—Hitchcock would be the mere showman that his erstwhile detractors mistook him for.

At the outset, Scottie attempts to overcome his vertigo through moderate and incremental steps, and Midge tells him that, according to a doctor, the vertigo will be cured only by a comparably great shock (one comparable to Scottie’s having narrowly escaped death and having seen his colleague fall and die). At the end of the movie, he gets a shock—he realizes that Madeleine is a made-up being, that Judy wasn’t merely his simulacrum of Madeleine but was one and the same, that he had been taken in not by his own obsession but by her, that he was not the master of the game but its pawn, that he was duped by Judy and by Elster. He has the shock of recognizing that the sardonic remarks of the local judge regarding his unfortunate failings were entirely accurate, that his lust had in fact made him an unwitting accomplice to murder.

He sees Judy fall to her death, but seeing that fall isn’t what cures him of his vertigo. He has already had the shock of realizing that his lust had turned him unwittingly evil—thus he is cured even before he gets to the bell tower, and is propelled up the steps, powered by righteous anger, not to cure himself but to prove himself already cured. He is cured of his acrophobia and of his vertigo, but not of his desire or of his memory—of an illusion and a pleasure that he’ll never be able to lose or to recreate except there. He’s finally free to get on with his life; at the moment that he regains his future, he’s swallowed up in his past. That’s the free fall, the famous dolly zoom in the tower staircase, in which he’s caught; it’s the visual metaphor that captures man’s fate. So, please allow me my irony of suggesting that the movie has a truly happy ending: the revelation of unhappy truth. Scottie returns to the world in love not with a dead woman but with the image of a dead woman; he is in danger of becoming a real-life cinecrophile. The best he can hope for is another metavisual shock. Happily, the movies, new and old, keep providing them.

P.S. The most controversial entry in my recent all-time ten-best list is Hitchcock’s “Marnie”; it’s the film in which the filmmaker finally realized his ideal of feminine appearance and performance and faced his own obsessional consequences.

P.P.S. My review of “Vertigo” included an error that slipped through uncaught, and I’m grateful to the reader Velda Cornelius for catching it and writing in to let me know: Barbara Bel Geddes plays not a “designer” but an illustrator. The downside of familiarity is imprecision.

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Common Sense Media Review

By Scott G. Mignola , based on child development research. How do we rate?

Must-see Hitchcock thriller for any classic movie bug.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this movie's mature subject matter isn't suitable for all teens, but it's a must-see for any classic movie bug, Hitchcock fan, or lover of complex suspense. Some mature themes parents may wish to discuss after viewing: obsession, murder, deceit.

Why Age 13+?

Some physical violence implied; none seen. Some tense moments.

Subtle sexual undertones haunt the movie.

Any Positive Content?

A woman allows an obsessive admirer to make her over in the image of a lost love

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Violence & Scariness

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Sex, Romance & Nudity

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Positive Messages

A woman allows an obsessive admirer to make her over in the image of a lost love.

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents Say (8)
• Kids Say (37)

Based on 8 parent reviews

like strangers of the train but for older kids

What's the story.

VERTIGO stars James Stewart as Scottie Ferguson, a police investigator who retires when he discovers he has a debilitating fear of heights. When a friend asks Scottie to find out whether his wife is possessed, Scottie agrees and begins trailing Madeleine (Kim Novak). Scottie follows the blond beauty to various areas in and around San Francisco, and then saves her life when she throws herself into the bay. He begins to fall for her, but mystery surrounds Madeleine -- and danger, too.

Is It Any Good?

Poorly received during its original 1958 release, Vertigo has since been hailed as one of Alfred Hitchcock's greatest achievements, and it's certainly one of his most disturbing. It's also, by his own accounts, his most personal picture, burrowing deep into what are said to have been some of the director's own darkest wormholes: obsessions with women, the desire to control them, and to mold them into a personal ideal. Such psychologically complex material is best suited for adults and mature teens, who will find more to enjoy here than a simple suspense story. This is the work of a master, whose genius shows in unconventional use of color and intricate storytelling that unwinds slowly, like the dizzying spirals of the opening credits sequence.

Stewart, is easy to sympathize with as the good-natured guy who learns too late that he's been set up. Kim Novak is also eerily convincing in a difficult role, and Barbara Bel Geddes is irresistible as Midge Wood, the woman Scottie would be in love with if he knew what was good for him. A painstaking two-year restoration project saved this movie for future generations. The colors are dazzling, and Bernard Herrmann's extraordinary score is crisp and haunting. Hitchcock would indeed be grateful.

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Families can talk about the different components that turn a suspense movie into something extraordinary.

Movie Details

• In theaters : May 9, 1958
• On DVD or streaming : March 6, 2000
• Cast : Barbara Bel Geddes , James Stewart , Kim Novak
• Director : Alfred Hitchcock
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Thriller
• Run time : 126 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG
• Last updated : December 14, 2024

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What to watch next.

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The Critical Re-reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) is now considered the greatest film of all time according to the critics that voted in the British Film Institute’s 2012 Sight & Sound poll. The survey, which is compiled once a decade, saw Hitchcock bumping Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which had held the spot for 50 years. But leaving aside this ranking, what is more surprising is the fact that Vertigo was a critical dud at the time it released in 1958, and didn’t fare well according to the standards of a major Hitchcock film at all. This critical reading of the film that has touted it to be one of the greats, therefore, speaks volumes about the role of film criticism that comes along with the ages.

The understanding of a narrative film depends upon a variety of factors that influence criticism and further interpretation. In this case, the contribution of film criticism that has placed the films of Hitchcock, especially Vertigo (1958), cannot be provided without stating the influence of film theorist Raymond Bellour. We can start by regarding the highly influential analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine in S/Z, where deconstructionist Roland Barthes had developed a “poetics” of narrative; that is, he sought to describe the structure and form taken by narratives, or narrative kinds, in general. He characterized narrative form in terms of the relationship between codes that were sequential in nature and propelled the narrative forward, along with codes that were static or reversible that signaled alternative narrative possibilities or meanings.

In a similar strain, Bellour largely embraced Barthes theory of narrative and adapted Barthes method of narrative segmentation and close analysis. Indeed, with some justice, he could be called the Roland Barthes of film studies. The long-delayed translation of Raymond Bellour’s seminal work ‘The Analysis of Film’, edited by Constance Penley is not just a seminal work in Hitchcock studies but a testament to the standards of excellence in film criticism.

If one begins with the initial response towards Vertigo (1958), the inclination towards the formal aspects of narrative action and suspense thriller are majorly dissed, with direct jabs at the impossibility of such a mystery to hold water and the long first half. But consecutively, after the film was restored in 1983, two years after Hitchcock’s death, significant changes were observed, where a certain number of writers were beginning to realize that beneath the entertaining and well-crafted surfaces of Hitchcock’s films were hidden layers of meaning just waiting to be explored.

In the case of Vertigo, this realization occurred by undermining the role of the romance narrative in maintaining gender subordination. Critics were inclined to play that role effectively so that the moral surface of human relationships must remain intact and the formation of the couple must be achieved.

Unlike conventional mystery-thrillers, which tend to lose their impact once a single viewing has unmasked their secrets, Vertigo (1958) does not even begin to reveal its depths once the mystery is solved, which is one reason why Hitchcock was able to get away with revealing the key to the murder plot well before the film is over.

To begin with the titular fear of heights, John “Scottie” Ferguson’s acrophobia would be little more than a plot device that makes him a victim, both of the gods for afflicting him with this dysfunction, and of Gavin Elster (played by Tom Helmore), who exploits it on the way to committing the perfect crime. As a phobia, on the other hand, Scottie’s dysfunction also implies a psychotic obsession with death that turns him, like Elster, into a victimizer because of how he manipulates women (both Madeleine and Midge, played by Kim Novak, in my reading) as a way of dealing with it.

Bellour was the one who painstakingly examined the film to show how Hitchcock strategically “blocked” the mystery elements to invest in the symbolic code rather than the hermeneutic code, unlike his other films. Notice the shift in which we are initially concerned as to whether accused murderess Maddalena (an Italian version of the name Madeleine) Paradine (Alida Valli) is guilty and whether her lawyer (Gregory Peck) will get her off, and then we soon become more interested in how the lawyer’s obsession with a woman from the darkness ultimately leads to her destruction.

The woman, drained of her life by being transformed into a voyeuristic, fetishized object, in effect becomes the sacrificial victim murdered by the gaze of the patriarchal male obsessed with controlling and conquering death. Hitchcock turned Vertigo into an acidic commentary on the sexual politics of the 1950s, which dictated that a woman should do whatever it took to land and hold on to a man, for the woman blindly follows that course and, in doing so, gradually self-destructs before our eyes.

It has to be understood that Hitchcock worked within a popular genre – the mystery-thriller – into which the director infused both dialectical and open-ended structures that invite, even urge, audiences to play an active role in the creative process. In Vertigo (1958), especially, Hitchcock makes his viewers complicit, not just as parallel voyeurs but also, as indulgent in Scottie’s need to see the face of death without dying.

Even though to an extent, we identify with Scottie’s horror at watching three deaths (the uniformed police officer, Madeleine, and Judy), the other part of us takes pleasure, via Hitchcock’s subjective camera, in having cheated death by watching it happen to a sacrificial victim, which in one sense is the essence of tragedy. Here lies the essence of patriarchal culture’s politics of control and domination that this victim that is always identified as ‘the other,’ most often a woman.

This critical refashioning of Vertigo (1958) is an important example in constituting film criticism as a significant tool in understanding Cinema, where the formal proclamation of a necessary standpoint in cinematic analysis no longer holds value. This finds an apt conclusion in Kim Novak’s subtle realization of Hitchcock’s mastery: “Hitch would write some scenes that I didn’t quite understand: I didn’t understand how they got from A to B, or C to D. And I asked him, and he said, “No, no. In a mystery, you never want to reveal exactly how you arrived at something .” And I said, “Yes, but there’s a scene that bothers me. It doesn’t make sense.” And he said, “That’s the point, my dear, that’s the point “.”

If You Enjoyed Reading About Vertigo (1958), Please Read:

1. hitchcock and his emotional minefield 2. lookback at hitchcock: marnie (1964), vertigo (1958) links: imdb , wikipedia, where to watch vertigo.

Santanu believes that in real life, there are names that surprise us because they don't seem to suit the person at all. But for the love of Krzysztof Kieslowski, and The Double Life of Veronique~ names can evoke a submission to the unreal.

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Vertigo Reviews

It may take a while to work up to its thriller elements, but it 100% earns its right to be called a thriller, and one of the best, most understated, and ingenious of all time at that.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 5, 2024

This remains one of the most painful depictions of romantic fatalism in all of cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 6, 2024

Once it switches over to us getting inside her head... I started seeing it more as Judy's story than Scottie's.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 9, 2024

It's a product of its time (especially when it comes to the treatment of the female characters), and it's not trying to be just a thriller. Rather, it is a story about a doomed romance that turns into a dangerous obsession. Full review in Spanish.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 17, 2023

Novak feels like she was left out to dry by Hitchcock as he spent far more time paying attention to the location of the brooch on her lapel than he spent instructing her on how to convey her character’s emotions.

Full Review | Feb 9, 2023

Vertigo is a film with numerous layers that can be discussed in depth and at length. That’s not to say it isn’t also an enjoyable film. Hitchcock knew how to make them. That’s why his films are generally beloved by critics and audiences alike.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 26, 2022

It is a story of obsession and control...

Full Review | Sep 13, 2022

Those eccentricities have since become accepted, defended, and loved...

Full Review | Sep 7, 2022

The plot is a brilliant box of devilish tricks. And yet the film disappoints. It seems too long, too elaborately designed; the narration of this kind of criminal intrigue sags under such luscious treatment; it needs the touch of the harsh and the squalid.

Full Review | Aug 9, 2022

Alfred Hitchcock tops his own fabulous record for suspense with Vertigo, a super-tale of murder, madness and mysticism that stars James Stewart and Kim Novak.

Full Review | May 13, 2022

This latest Alfred Hitchcock "thrillorama" offers further evidence of his mastery in mystery and suspense, for, despite its flaws, it grips one's attention from start to finish.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2022

A motion picture of incomparable dramatic involvement and hypnotic filmmaking.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 21, 2022

It's probably the most impeccably put together Hitchcock movie... but ultimately it's men trying to control women, and that doesn't ring very well right now.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2021

Jimmy Stewart is an actor who always delivers, especially in the films he did with Hitchcock. Scottie isn't my favorite character he played but it really is a wonderful performance.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2021

Hitchcock is often spoken about regarding his "perfectionism," this way every shot is carefully arranged and the edits hit like a knife. That's no less true here...

Full Review | Dec 8, 2020

One of Hitchcock's finest achievements, layering drama, a love story, adventure, and hair-raising suspense into a psychological murder-mystery that simply has no peers.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Aug 23, 2020

If the cinema was [Hitchcock's] church, this film was his confession.

Full Review | Aug 13, 2020

[Its] meticulous realism both indicts and empathizes with Scottie's squeezed, linear policeman mentality at odds with other, more profound longings, which depend, in the final analysis, on a radical change in social circumstances.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2020

God, this is such a weird film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jun 2, 2020

The storytelling isn't up to much. It drags and drags.

Full Review | May 18, 2020