Hitchcock's 'Vertigo': a journey into fear, terror and 5 decades of thrillers

My cinematic knowledge, for all practical purposes, starts with 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ve seen a representative number of important and interesting releases from all the post 1960s decades, but when it comes to earlier films, even the “standards” that everyone is supposed to have seen, my viewing is virtually nil.

May the gods of classic cinema have mercy on my poorly educated soul.

The point is, I’m trying to remedy this, and as much as I might wish for it, there’s no Matrix-like* way to inject 50 years of film history into my brain. As I did several years ago when I decided I wanted to learn more about 70s film (a decade which I’m still learning), I’ve got to actually plop down and watch “old” movies from beginning to end.

This, as you might imagine, is not exactly torture, but it does require some effort.

All this to say - I finally got around to seeing Vertigo, and it’s everything I always wanted from classic thriller. Hitchcock’s compositions bare a studied, formal excellence; even on first viewing, every move seems painstakingly refined. The production design, with its lush reds and greens, turns San Francisco into an immaculate dreamworld, equal parts mystery, terror and seductive fantasyland.

Best of all is Bernard Hermann’s score, which glides over and through the images like a thick, magical fog. Hitchcock’s work is top notch, but it’s Hermann’s bold, enveloping score that makes the film – it’s as entrancing as Kim Novak’s eyes.

Novak, for her part, plays the part of ingénue with supreme grace. Her role as Mystery Woman is necessarily left somewhat blank, but she fills in enough of the gaps that it ceases to be an issue. Much better is Barbara Bel Geddes as the charming, smart, perky Midge, though she drops out of the film without much closure.

Jimmy Stewart is, as even someone as unfamiliar as I with the period knows, a superb leading man. His acting skills are adequate, but even more, he’s got that ineffable combination of manly certainty, good looks and sympathetic eyes that mark him as the perfect cipher through which to tell a visual story.

Vertigo is put together in such an unerring, careful fashion that its threads of desperation and obsession make perfect sense – they are, it certainly seems, what Hitchcock and company relied on to create it.
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*See? All my references are from the modern canon. I'm a spoiled middle-American pop culture lover with no real claim to being a cineaste. You might as well quit reading now and hit up Filmbrain; you don't want to deal with my cinematically vacuous ass.