THE TEN GREATEST FILMS: OF ALL TIME

VERTIGO

1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock, not known for being laconic, once summed up his defining masterpiece, cinema’s defining masterpiece, as, “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again, boy loses girl again”. While his summation is, of course, not inaccurate, it is indeed comically inadequate. Perhaps his sparsity of words was due to the fact that, contemporaneously, ‘Vertigo‘ was both a critical and commercial flop, and to try sell its story in a press release was clearly an exercise in futility. Or perhaps he was quietly having a wink at us all, knowing that one day, years down the line, its themes would be unpacked and attacked, that one day his movie would receive the medium’s greatest reassessment and subsequent critical reversal. Who knows. Plot wise, however, the general consensus is that ‘Vertigo’ has more holes in it than your favourite Swiss cheese. Scottie (James Stewart) is persuaded out of retirement by an old college friend, whose wife Madeleine, Scottie is to follow. For several scenes, set solely to diegetic sounds and Bernard Herrmann’s spellbinding score, Scottie trails her, following Madeleine into flower shops, museums, cemeteries, old hotels, and finally into the San Francisco Bay. The two begin to meet in more mutual circumstances, and Scottie finds himself smitten. What he does not know is that Madeleine, or who he thinks is Madeleine, is merely a rouse. Though, when “boy loses girl”, we are as unaware of this as Scottie is. Then, with Scottie believing to have lost Madeleine for good, the story switches focus. It is here, with the revealing of the rouse, as Scottie grieves the loss of the woman he loved, that he meets someone who reminds him of her. It is also here, with what would typically be the climax behind us, that ‘Vertigo’  takes a different trajectory, propelling it out of the mystery\thriller category, and into a league of its own. Hitchcock’s forty-fifth film is one that veered away from his usual formula, which probably explains why it disappointed both critics and audiences alike. The result can be classed neither as a suspense, nor really a ‘mystery’, but in the way that it deals with love, desire, and obsession, it is hypnotic, and terrifyingly so. 

One morning, five springs ago, as I lay on a Los Angelan floor feeling unenthused about the idea of traipsing around all day without a car again, I decided to give Alfred Hitchcock a go. ‘North by Northwest’  was first, since Cary Grant’s was a name I knew. With the movie behind me by breakfast, I decided to swap the sun for shadows, and to continue my journey. Following swiftly on its heels came ‘Psycho’, ‘Rear Window’, and ‘To Catch a Thief’ . Then I watched ‘Vertigo’. Expecting what I had come quickly to understand as the Hitchcock ‘genre’, the credits rolled, and I felt not only underwhelmed, but disappointed. I found it at best, unlikeable, at worst, really rather boring – two claims one can hardly levy against Hitchcock’s films. I wasn’t aware then of its standing atop the 2012 poll as the greatest film of all time, nor was I aware of the endless library of books, articles, essays and films about it. It was merely another one ticked off the list, one I didn’t quite connect with. But since then I have changed; grown in some ways, regressed in others. I have found love a few times and lost it just as many, made new friends and grown apart from old ones, done things I didn’t think I would’ve and not done things I should’ve. As I grow and get older, above all the rest, ‘Vertigo‘ seems to grow with me. The more I know, the greater my capacity to empathise with certain feelings, deal with certain emotions, the more the movie seems to show itself to me. It reveals new depths and new layers I was not yet ready for on that uncomfortable, dust ridden Californian floor. Scottie’s, in this case fulfilled, desire to recreate, inch by inch, exactly what he has lost, is not something I can directly relate to. But that feeling of emptiness, and the desire to fill it, even in some cases the feeble attempt to replicate that which once filled it, is something I think we are all too familiar with – regardless of whether that which eludes us was ever real in the first place, or purely an image we’d created. In that sense, Scottie reflects the dark side in all of us. His actions embody a universally deep desire to fill a void that has been left by someone, to heal ourselves, no matter the pain it might cause, no matter the cost. He merely takes it a step further than most of us’d dare to. It was only upon my fifth viewing, two years later, that I felt like I finally understood it. But I was wrong. The number of times I’ve seen it now has since surpassed single digits, and every time I find myself grappling with new feelings, new reflections, and new emotions. ‘Vertigo’ remains, in my opinion, the greatest film ever made.