Vertigo Review

The 1958 notices were lukewarm and it took two decades of reappraisal for the profession to agree on what the film actually is. Hitchcock spends the first hour on a man driving, following and watching, almost without dialogue, until the audience is complicit in the surveillance. Then he gives the secret away at the midpoint rather than saving it, which converts the last act from a mystery into a slow horror about obsession finishing its work.

Robert Burks shoots San Francisco in colors that belong to a dream and not a city, the shot down the bell tower stairwell is the most copied camera trick in the medium, and Bernard Herrmann's score circles instead of resolving. James Stewart spends his own likability on purpose, playing a decent man curdling in front of you. Kim Novak carries two performances inside one body and got very little credit at the time, which the modern consensus has corrected.

The writing is the weak joint. Midge exists mostly to explain things, the mechanics need a confession letter to hold together, and the lines are serviceable where the images are not. Critics now rank it at or near the top of the medium, and the ranking is about what the picture does to a viewer rather than what it says out loud.