Release Year: 1958

Genre: Mystery, Romance, Thriller

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writer: Alec Coppel, Samuel Taylor; Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (novel)

Stars: James Stewart, Kim Novak

Is it true… blondes have more fun?

Not in Vertigo, they don't.

In Alfred Hitchcock's classic story of erotic obsession, Hitch's famously cool and elegant blondes are degraded, abandoned, murdered, and driven to suicide.

Basically the opposite of fun.

Vertigo is a psychological thriller about love and loss, guilt and obsession, desire and deceit, memory and madness. Our hero—and believe us, we're using that term very, very loosely—is John "Scottie" Ferguson, retired from the San Francisco police force after nearly falling to his death during a rooftop chase and watching a fellow officer die trying to save him. Left with a crippling case of acrophobia (fear of heights) and vertigo (dizziness), he's crushed with guilt and struggling to put his life back together.

Scottie's asked, as a favor, to investigate a friend's beautiful but death-obsessed wife, possessed by the spirit of her suicidal great-grandmother and having an annoying tendency to disappear and go into trances. Scottie's going to follow her for a few days and see where she's been going. Alright, so this is gonna be a mystery movie, right, or a ghost story, maybe?

Nope.

Scottie falls passionately in lust with this gorgeous but troubled woman. However, under the spell of great-grandma, she throws herself from a bell tower in an old Spanish mission that she's seen during her trances. Scottie ends up in a mental hospital, tortured again by guilt because his acrophobia and vertigo kept him from following her up the bell tower stairs and saving her. His attempt to "resurrect" his dead lover by recreating her in another woman ends again in tragedy, as Scottie realizes he's been the victim of a devastating deception and an unwitting accomplice to a murder.

Oof.

At its 1958 release (premiering in San Francisco, fittingly), the film garnered a collective "meh" at best. It was "too slow and too long" (Variety); The New Yorker called it "far-fetched nonsense (source). It barely broke even at the box office. It wasn't what people expected from Hitchcock, master of the macabre. Audiences didn't quite know what to do with this plunge into the darkest recesses of sexual obsession and romantic delusion. They developed their own case of vertigo as they tried to make sense of the convoluted plot and sudden shifts in time and perspective.

 The film grew in popularity and critical esteem over the years, though, climbing up the AFI's list of Greatest American Films (#61 in 1998, #9 in 2008), and getting a complete restoration in 1996, including surround sound and 70 mm format (source). In 2012, Vertigo did the impossible: it knocked Citizen Kane from the top spot on BFI's list of Fifty Greatest Films of All Time, a slot it had held for fifty years. Fifty. Years.

One last thing: Vertigo is also a movie about the movies—about the relationship between the creator and the image created, and the voyeuristic nature of watching films. Leading lady Kim Novak, who played the character forced into submitting to a make-over by the obsessed Scottie, told an interviewer, "It was the opportunity to express what was going on between me and Hollywood" as she learned to take direction and become what Hitchcock wanted her to be (source).

It's all very meta.

Welcome to Hitchcock.

Everyone knows that Alfred Hitchcock was the Master of Suspense. The Birds—terrifying. Dial M for Murder—creepy. Psycho—we can't even. Trained during the silent film era, he created films using innovative camera and lighting techniques that kept his audiences on the edge of their seats. He could do chases, comedy, and slasher scenes with the best of 'em, but what Hitchcock really loved to do was to explore human psychology in all its weirdness and complexity. Voyeurism, fetishism, obsession, treachery—Hitchcock loved them all, and they all come together in Vertigo.

It's a neat trick: we think we're watching an eerie mystery movie, but we're really getting schooled in some ideas about what it means to fall in love with an illusion.

The film makes us 'fess up to all those fantasies we create and those stories we tell ourselves. We probably never fell in love with someone possessed by a ghost, but we may have fallen in love with someone we hardly knew. We've hopefully never made our new GF/BF dye their hair and dress exactly like our ex, but we've probably wished they could be a little more like someone else at times. We all know what it's like to want to be loved for ourselves and how hard it can be to try to be who we're not just to get someone to notice us.  We all know guilt and loss, unfortunately.

Vertigo's plot may be, as the New Yorker said in 1958, far-fetched; hopefully we'll never find ourselves hanging between life and death as our hands slowly slip off a gutter ten stories about the street.

The psychological themes, though? We can relate.