#Vertigo hitchcock movie

The influence of Vertigo is, of course, undeniable it’s no accident that the late Laura Palmer’s mysterious doppelganger in Twin Peaks is named Madeleine Ferguson. Younger viewers who have grown up with a (grossly unfair) image of old movies as morally simplistic continuously find themselves gobsmacked by this messy, heartbreaking psychodrama. Though he doesn’t know it, Scottie’s puzzle-box is solved by the end of the second act deep down, Madeleine knows there’s no solving hers.īut everything that made Vertigo so unsatisfying to contemporaneous audiences is precisely why its profile has steadily risen in the decades since. Through Madeleine’s eyes, we see the real-life psychological trauma that would beset one of Hitchcock’s protagonists– and the wrenching guilt of knowing one has completely destroyed the life of a kind, decent man. Our perspective character is no longer the indefatigable detective, but the femme fatale. In the second half, however, things shift. The first half of Vertigo contains all the Hitchcockian hallmarks: the witty banter, the pop-Freudian psychology, the jaw-dropping action sequences. By the decade’s end, however, the director was starting to chafe at his own formula and, in Vertigo, essentially turned it inside out (two films later, with Psycho, he would obliterate the formula entirely).

#Vertigo hitchcock movie

Hitchcock had spent his ‘50s directing a string of highly successful (and rightly revered) thrillers like The Man Who Knew Too Much and To Catch a Thief, all lush, Technicolor affairs featuring glamorous movie stars and labyrinthine (yet tidy) plots of intrigue. Placing it in context, one can see why Vertigo may not have sat well with critics or audiences at the time. She can’t bring herself to deliver the letter, however, and instead attempts to make things right with this very broken man. As the two begin a relationship of their own, Judy drafts a letter of confession: she is Madeleine, and the story of her obsession (and death) was all an elaborate ruse. Upon his release, Scottie is shaken to meet Judy, a young woman who bears the spitting image of his late love. After Madeleine’s demise, we follow Scottie through a stint in a mental hospital, and it becomes clear that this is not the same plucky detective we spent the first half of the film getting to know. Madeleine continues to be haunted by this woman from the past, however, and when she clambers up the same clocktower in which she met her end, Scottie is unable to rescue her.īy this point, we have reached the logical endpoint of the classic Hitchcockian thriller– but for the fact that we are only at the film’s halfway point. When Madeleine jumps into the bay herself, Scottie rescues her, and the two begin a flirtatious relationship. She stares for hours at a painting which bears a remarkable resemblance to herself– a painting which he later learns depicts a 19th-century woman who committed suicide. Scottie trails Madeleine through the streets of San Francisco (in a treasure trove of vintage location shots), and confirms that her behavior is indeed peculiar. Scottie’s convalescence is interrupted when an old friend convinces him to ply his former trade by following his wife, Madeleine (a never-more-beguiling Kim Novak), who he says has been acting erratically. Jimmy Stewart plays former detective Scottie Ferguson, retired and stricken with the titular ailment following a traumatic mission. The answer to both may lie in its notoriously difficult-to-summarize plot (at least without spoiling the big twist– if you have not seen Vertigo, I recommend you stop reading right now and purchase tickets to tonight’s 70mm screening at the Somerville Theatre ). What is it about this slippery little thriller that baffled critics of its time– and elevated it to the dizzying heights it occupies today?

It was a long road for Hitch’s film, which, like so many now-annointed classics, was ambivalently received at the time of its release legendary critic Pauline Kael dismissed it as “stupid,” while Welles himself singled it out as the worst film of the director’s filmography. In 2012, the more pedantic wing of the film world was rocked: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic Vertigo unseated Citizen Kane at the top of Sight & Sound’s decennial poll of the greatest films of all time, a slot which Welles’ masterpiece had occupied for the previous 50 years.