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In the world of filmmaking, there are few people as influential in the field as Alfred Hitchcock. Not only in terms of constructing narratives and cinematography, but also in raising the status of the director within the film industry. Aside from maybe Orson Welles, who acted as well as directed, Alfred Hitchcock was one of the first directors to become famous as a figure in pop culture outside of his films. Nowadays of course ‘auteur’ directors are commonplace, in fact they’re probably the standard, but Hitchcock basically made himself a brand name in the days when most people thought the director was just someone who told a guy where to point the camera. There’s a reason that Hitchcockian is considered a legitimate adjective in regards to film, along with Lynchian and Whedonesque. Also, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Joss Whedon are all film directors who have had their own television shows. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Hitchcock had a string of well-regarded films during his heyday, many of them thrillers or mysteries, which fit into my personal criteria for a Halloween movie. I could have gone with The Birds, the prototypical ‘animal attack’ movie, or Psycho, the prototypical slasher movie, but I decided to take a detour and try out Vertigo. Mainly it was because I often see it being placed alongside Citizen Kane as the best film ever made and I wanted to see if the hype surrounding it was legitimate, but also because a while back I had seen the film Rope, which like Vertigo was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starred Jimmy Stewart in a major role. I thought Rope was fucking excellent (there’s actually a write-up of it on my oft-neglected film blog you could check out), so a chance to see the two men working together on a new project was worth checking out. Well, it hasn’t been new for about 50 years, but you get the idea.
I don’t want to write too much about the events in the film, since I have the tendency to overwrite, and I might be treading familiar territory anyway, but I believe that Vertigo is a film about obsession. I’m sure you could say that about many Hitchcock movies and the thriller genre, but it’s definitely a major theme in this particular film. Scotty Ferguson (Stewart), our protagonist, begins life as an aloof bachelor, but eventually falls in love with Madeline the wife of his friend, who seems to fall prey to long bouts of dissociative fugue states. When Madeline dies unexpectedly, the passion that would have once been seen as a commendable trait soon gives way to toxic, all-encompassing obsession. Which only compounds upon itself when Scotty comes across, Judy, who bears a striking resemblance to his once deceased Madeline. How far will Scotty go to relive his romance with Madeline? You’ll have to watch it and find out.
Whether Vertigo is the best film of all time, or whether it’s the better than Citizen Kane I can’t honestly say. I’ve seen both, I’ve liked both, and whether or not you like one movie over the other has always felt like a subjective argument to me anyway. What I will say though is that the acting is great, the music is spot-on and the scenes of 1950’s San Francisco are downright stunning. It’s a film that you could enjoy any time of year, but it’s dark themes earn a spot on my Halloween list.
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