Critics reviews

James Stewart is the embodiment of the anti-hero – as he already was in Rear Window (1954) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) – and he finds himself falling for Kim Novak as the archetype of the femme fatale. But what makes Vertigo different is how this love affair exposes the weaknesses and failings of these two people – to the point that everyone can identify with it. That's the power of love according to Hitch.

Dive (or fall) deeper into Vertigo and it's clear the reasons for the film's enduring influence extend far beyond its ample surface pleasures. Hitchcock counted this as the most personal of his works, and it plays as a self-lacerating roman à clef, a deeply felt dramatization of the dark side of his filmmaking practice—the voyeuristic concerns of Rear Window (1954) pushed to their extreme.

Vertigo does a number of things astoundingly well. The double structure is a stroke of genius, with the film's first half producing a terribly compelling thriller, and the second opening up Jimmy Stewart's Scottie in a way that reveals his motivations while illuminating his true colorus... Yet at the core of the film sits a love story that, for a modern audience, is virtually impossible to abide.

Despite its massive popularity and canonization as the classic film, VERTIGO remains one of the most insidious, disturbing movies of all time, particularly as it relates to the tortuous labyrinth of the psyche. Out of all the films in the Hitchcock oeuvre, VERTIGO resonates with the most Freudian overtones.

Brilliant but despicably cynical view of human obsession and the tendency of those in love to try to manipulate each other.

If cinema is a dream, Vertigo is its nightmare. What is it that makes this delirious tale of obsession and psychosis so stick in the craw? Surely there are other films, masterpieces even, which tell of dark, doomed romance, but perhaps never with such all-consuming rapture.

For me romanticism is the key to Hitchcock's unequalled capacity to unsettle and move the spectator with a degree of implication and intensity that goes beyond a supposed ‘identification' with the protagonist – an identification that Hitchcock tended to rupture violently and traumatically, and which in general was projected not on to a single (male) person, but on to the couple, at least.

Though commonly understood chiefly as a vehicle for the psychological deconstruction of Scottie, Vertigo is in fact one of the most comprehensive studies of two people in the history of cinema. Both main characters - specifically, Scottie of the first half and Judy of the second - are without a fixed identity, prepared to be malleable entities to achieve what they desire yet simultaneously hiding some aspect of their inner life.

The irrepressible allure of Hitchcock's visual extravagance—his baroque swirl of caustic greens, voluptuous purples, acidic yellows, and fiery reds, and the indecent glare of daylight—conjures a vortex of unconscious desires beyond the realm of dramatic machinations; his happy ending, of health restored and crime punished, resembles an aridly monastic renunciation.

Stewart's great performance doesn't fully delineate Scottie anymore than Hitchcock attempts to tell a naturalistic story, and his elusive affliction(s) are a large part of what makes the film compelling on re-viewings. Is his vertigo a metaphor? For what?

It's a movie about memory that actually improves the more you go over its folds. This time, returning to the deluxe 1996 restoration, I noticed a masterful symmetry: Scottie, quietly on the case, follows Madeleine into the hazy, greenish sunlight of a cemetery. Later, she'll emerge from yet another green haze, a neon light, walking out of death's grip into his arms. Do directors even think about things like that anymore?

This Stewart character is not a happy drunk. He's closer to psychotic. This collaboration between Stewart and Hitchcock pushes the model American male over the brink into a terrifying space, and it's all the more effective because of Stewart's prior film history and the warping made possible by it.