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This is the big one. Robin looks at what has been recently voted as the greatest film ever made.

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52 Weeks of Hitchcock: 27. Vertigo

Robin tries to find something new to say about one of the most analysed and justly celebrated films of all time.

Comments

Anonymous

I love your enthusiasm for this film! I watched many years ago, probably before you were born, but all I really remember is the vertigo effect. It's on Amazon Prime streaming, so I'll have it tonight to kick off my 4th of July holiday weekend!

Stephen Crane

I honestly must be missing something. No offense intended whatsoever but this is a good film to me, eminently watchable but it's not the best ever in my opinion.

Anonymous

The idea that this film is a ghost story without ghosts really ties in with the ending, where Scotty is frozen in the realization of what he's had and lost--he becomes a ghost. A haunting is, basically, when someone's spirit is trapped in the worst moment of their life, with no way to move on, and that's what's happened to him.

Anonymous

Love this film, great video. One thing I thought was when Scotty is tailing her and she goes into the shop, she uses the delivery door. It doesn’t make sense till you find out she works there. The music is unsettled partly due to glitching time, a very jazz technique. Miles Davis’ ‘Tutu’ is a good example. Agree Midge deserve a happy ending. In his cameo Hitchcock might be carrying a plague mask in a case, although it is probably a bugle.

Jasmine Zantara

Well, you convinced me. At the sixteen-minute mark when you encouraged us to watch the movie cold, I did it and watched the movie, only my fourth HItchcock film (the others being Psycho, The Birds, and Family Plot). I have gone though life never having been spoiled to anything in this movie. Now that I have finally seen it....I am massively disappointed. Even though I saw the mid-film twist coming a mile away, I was enjoying the first half. But I just hated the second half. There was no way I could buy that Judy would love Scottie enough to let him creepily modify her into someone that was not her. I was annoyed by the ending's sudden stop. I was sure up to that point that the whole second half was a delusion happening in Scottie's head, being dreamt in the mental hospital, since the transition from Midge's last scene to the following scene was nonexistent. Maybe I just expected something totally different? And this is why I usually avoid films that are universally praised.

Anonymous

I do think with the coda Robin mentioned the theory that it is all in his head after Midge's exit would work. It would fit with Freud's theory of using, then destroying a construct to get over a tragedy. A still popular method at the time that the film was made.

Anonymous

I've always liked Vertigo, it is one of the more artistic of Hitchcock's works and I don't over analyse the film as there are some dodgy bits in it - I just like it. Kim Novak is immensely watchable and it's funny to think that Vertigo and Bell Book and Candle came out in the same year.

Anonymous

Re: the music, I think the score includes distorted references to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which is a doomed romance with music very powerful and quite expressionistic for the time (the plot of the opera is, as is usual with these things, nonsense). Wagner's music was also used in a scene in The Birds. (Herrmann's Wagner influenced score is also used for a powerful scene in 12 Monkeys.)

Anonymous

I can see why Hitchcock resisted using the "what really happened" sequence in the film, as it seems to be breaking narrative conventions by giving away the twist too soon. But in actuality it is vital for the success if the second half of the film. Firstly, it is an archetypal enactment of Hitchcock's ideal of suspense: a bomb under a seat, which we are aware of but the characters are not. The bomb Scotty is sitting on is the big twist of the movie, and if we don't know about it then all that potential is lost. Secondly, the revelation gives us access to Madeline's emotional journey. If we didn't know who she really was and what she'd experienced, we wouldn't understand why she was so twitchy and why she was letting this man try to remake her. (BTW, do you think "Madeline" is a reference to Proust?)

Anonymous

I wonder if the "sting" sound effect from the tower staircase vertigo scene plays in Robin's head every time he's at the top of his spiral staircase looking down. 😄