I was a bit surprised to learn not that long ago that Vertigo may be the best film ever made according to some critics. Yeah, the granddaddy of such titles was always Citizen Kane (coming very soon in this series), and I have heard that same thing said more recently about The Godfather. I can believe that for Kane and The Godfather, but Vertigo is a somewhat surprising choice to me. I don’t think it was the top Hitchcock film on the AFI list I went through, and it isn’t the top pick on the Stacker list either. And yet, I found that comment in multiple places that put Vertigo as the greatest film ever made.
Honestly, it’s not my favorite Hitchcock by a longshot.
I can’t quite put my finger on why I don’t much care for Vertigo. I do like most of the Hitchcock films I’ve seen. Psycho is great. North by Northwest is a great thrill ride. To Catch a Thief is a jaunty adventure. Frenzy is a great murder mystery. Heck, I enjoyed the hell out of The Trouble with Harry. So, why don’t I care so much for Vertigo? To be honest, I know why it’s beloved, and it may be the closest Hitchcock ever came to an experimental film. Hitchcock’s use of color is probably at its most striking here, and this film is a case of Hitchcock actually stepping away from his usual formula of an ordinary person being thrust into extraordinary circumstances as Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie Ferguson, a retired police detective turned into something like a private investigator, is actually well within his wheelhouse.
Besides, for all that I am into film, that is not exactly a requirement to like every film considered to be a classic. I mentioned Citizen Kane above, but is that anyone’s favorite film? I’m not sure I know anyone who loves it so much as they appreciate it though I am sure the film has its fans. My pal Watson loves The Godfather but he doesn’t much care for The Godfather Part II. I didn’t care for Lawrence of Arabia when I first saw it, but I was later surprised to find a friend who did unabashedly love it. It’s somewhat like people who are big into films but have these “guilty pleasure” favorites that are, well, not exactly high cinema. Like how I always put Army of Darkness into my personal top ten. No one is going to confuse Bruce Campbell fighting flimsy skeletons as great art.
But that doesn’t exactly explain why I don’t care as much for Vertigo. I think part of it is the film pretends there’s a supernatural element at play, but in the end, there isn’t. That the film reveals there isn’t a ghost or something until the last few minutes rubs me the wrong way. Hitchcock, aside from maybe The Birds, doesn’t really do stuff with ghosts and goblins, despite his reputation connecting him to horror (something I explored with the Stacker Challenge Psycho write-up). And aside from Kim Novak’s acting weird here and there, there’s nothing here that feels all that supernatural.
Then there’s the way that Scottie “sees” a woman he thought dead in a bad disguise and essentially forces her to change her entire appearance to make her look like the woman he knew. That, well, that doesn’t feel right to me. Scottie’s obsession with Judy or Madeleine, whatever her name is, may not be all that healthy, but if Judy really isn’t Madeleine, well…that’s not cool, is it? Plus, she is involved in a murder. That’s not a relationship for the ages.
And I’m generally baffled as to why Scottie’s ex-fiancée Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) is still hanging around. I guess she still has a thing for him? I’m all for seeing cinematic platonic friendships between the sexes since it seems to happen so rarely, but the fact is that they were briefly engaged and she still hangs around helping him. Now, I suppose the two realized they didn’t work that way, but the dialogue seems to suggest she might still be somewhat into him in their first scene. I guess there was a feeling that there needed to be a reason for the two of them to be hanging out because for all I know, either Hitchcock or the studio took issue with a woman being a man’s friend and nothing more, but I can think of a couple reasons off the top of my head like Midge is his secretary, his maid, or even his sister. They just had to go with “former lover.”
And, to be a bit petty…for a film about a guy who suffers from extreme (if temporary in the grand scheme of things) vertigo, that doesn’t seem to play much into the plot. Heck, I’d like to know what happened to that guy Scottie and that unfortunate uniformed cop were chasing, but I don’t think it ever comes up. Yeah, that criminal is probably just one of Hitchcock’s Macguffins to get the plot rolling by showing where Scottie’s fear of heights came from, but I see that, and I wonder things. Heck, I’d like to know how Scottie eventually got out of that mess.
So, really, for all I do love a lot of Hitchcock, and even though it is far from a bad film or even one I openly despise or something, I just can’t really get into Vertigo. Now, the remaining Hitchcock film on the Stacker list? Oh, that’s a completely different story.
NEXT: Speaking of candidates for Greatest Film Ever Made, be back soon for 1941’s Citizen Kane.
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