Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,’’ recently named the best film of all time in a prestigious international poll of movie experts, wasn’t always held in such high regard.
The 1958 thriller starring James Stewart and Kim Novak — which debuts October 28 on Blu-ray in a gorgeous high-def transfer as part of “Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection” — was initially labeled by critics as implausible, morbid and decidedly inferior to Hitch’s other classics. It flopped at the box office.
“Vertigo’’ didn’t even turn up in the once-a-decade poll conducted by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine until 1982, two years after Hitchcock’s death, when it came at No. 7.
By 2002, “Vertigo’’ was just four votes behind Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane,’’ which had led the poll for 50 years until the latest installment in August, voted on by 846 critics and film programmers.
Both movies are among my favorites, but how did “Vertigo’’ eventually land at No. 1? And is it really better than 1941’s “Citizen Kane’’?
Voyeurism is a major theme of “Vertigo’,’ and one that deeply resonates with voters who watch movies for a living. Stewart plays a police detective, retired after a fatal accident, who is hired by a college pal to trail his wife (Novak). Stewart is told she goes into trances in which she identifies with her late, tragic grandmother.
Our hero falls for his client’s wife after saving her from a suicide attempt, but because of his vertigo — fear of heights — he is helpless to prevent her second attempt. After a lengthy institutionalization, Stewart meets a woman who resembles the dead wife (also played by Novak) and he proceeds to aggressively make her over in the depressed woman’s image.
Hitchcock gives away this new sweetheart’s secret right after they meet, preferably to build suspense over how our emotionally fragile protagonist will react to her deception. By any measure, it’s a preposterous plot with holes you can drive a truck through. For starters, how does Stewart escape from the roof ledge he’s dangling from in the very first scene?
Greatly abetted by peak performances from Stewart and Hitchcock’s favorite composer, Bernard Herrmann, “Vertigo’’ weaves a morbidly romantic spell that almost anyone who’s wanted a second chance in love can relate to on some level.
It gets extra points with the film establishment for being a more “personal’’ film than “Citizen Kane’’ — deepened by years of revelations about Hitchcock’s obsession with his blond stars, from Grace Kelly to Tippi Hedren. Film professionals have also gravitated to “Vertigo’’ because the film’s narrative looseness allows them to write an almost infinite number of psychological interpretations.
This is definitely not the case with “Citizen Kane,’’ which tells a tightly scripted story about a media mogul’s rise and fall that you can pretty much take only one way. As Pauline Kael definitively established in her essay “Raising Kane,’’ it’s a vision created by Welles and co-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. There was a team of writers on “Vertigo,’’ but it’s Hitchcock through and through.
Technically groundbreaking, “Citizen Kane’’ boasts cinematography, effects work and editing far superior to “Vertigo,’’ which was made 17 years later. The animated sequence in “Vertigo’’ is almost laughable in its crudeness, even for 1958. “Kane’’ is also more entertaining; it has humor, something almost entirely lacking in Hitchcock’s film.
But once you overlook its sheer nuttiness, “Vertigo’’ transports audiences to a dark, dream-like place in ways that transcend its tortured story line.