Why we all fall for Vertigo Is Hitchcock’s thriller really the best film ever made, wonders Tim Robey

Why we all fall for Vertigo

Is Hitchcock’s thriller really the best film ever made, wonders Tim Robey

or the first time in 50 years, a movie other than Citizen Kane has topped one of the most widely recognised canons in cinema — Sight & Sound’s esteemed 10-yearly poll of critical favourites. That film is Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. For a long time, it has been nipping at Kane’s heels, having come second in this contest by just five votes a decade ago. Somewhat surprisingly, it sailed into the top slot by a wide margin on this occasion. We have a new Best Film of All Time, and it could well be here to stay. Lots of people own up to favourite Hitchcock films that aren’t Vertigo, and in the past I’ve wondered if his sheer productivity acted as a vote-splitting handicap in these contests. He made scarier films (Psycho), more playful ones (Rear Window), more suspenseful ones (Strangers On A Train), and a very great number that are easier to watch. Still, there’s a special intensity to Vertigo, and a very personal kind of power. Hitchcock could be such a tease, offering the slyest hints of a devious personality behind the glossy facade of his plots, but here there’s something deadly serious going on, as if he decided to drop the elegant gamesmanship once and for all, and lay something bare about his and our deepest propensities and fears. Vertigo was a dismaying flop when it came out in 1958, and not even the reviews were all that appreciative. Critics complained that the story, taken from a novel called D’Entre Les Morts by the French crime-writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, was obtuse and implausible. Even though its rehabilitation as a classic was well under way at the time, I remember my first viewing being something of a disappointment, too. I was hoovering up Hitchcocks from their TV airings in my mid-teens, high on Psycho and Notorious, and found the whole structure of this one broken and bewildering. It didn’t satisfy my early notions of what “Hitchcockian” meant, and the lure of it as romantic fantasy probably didn’t strike much of a chord either. Next to the addictive wickedness of his other thrillers, it was an oddly foreign proposition, arty and stilted-seeming. What I hadn’t realised is that Vertigo is the ultimate grower. In its very bones, the movie is about a repetitive pattern of romantic obsession, and it is entirely fitting that such a pattern makes more sense the more we see it repeated: it’s an experience that gets correspondingly more deep and dreamlike with every viewing, echoing further back into the reaches of the subconscious. Having given it another chance, and another, and several more, and decided that it was extraordinary, I wrote part of a final thesis about the diptych structure of the script, which is broken-backed in a deliberate way — it starts twice, and most of the second half is a tragic attempt on Scottie’s part to replicate and mend the first. Unfortunately, it’s too late. He is the victim of a conspiracy, but also of a fiddly, throwaway Hitchcocky thriller plot we’re uniquely permitted not to give two figs about. The point is that the plot — he’s the stooge in the long-planned murder of an old friend’s wife — thwarts Scottie’s great fantasy, which is an impossible dream of fulfilling love with Novak’s Madeleine, and his response to this is to go very believably insane. When he finds Madeleine’s spitting image, Judy, in the second half, his attempts to remake her into the woman he once knew are charged with all our ideas of the Hitchcock blonde as something to be caught and possessed, almost bottled. Vertigo is also a picture that monumentalises the illusions, conceits and consolations of the cinematic art. Hitchcock never used colour with such swooning yet nightmarish force. It’s as if red and green — opposite poles on the spectrum, capable of strikingly beautiful juxtaposition but also headache-inducing contrast — were established in this one movie as the new black and white. As Madeleine walks entranced around a graveyard near the beginning, she is bathed in the ghostly light of a green fog filter, an aura Hitchcock later supplies to Judy using the neon sign outside her flat. The reds flare up like danger signals even as Scottie’s libido swells. In Bernard Herrmann’s score, certainly one of the greatest in the history of movies, we have an extraordinary invitation to escape into the film’s high-wire realm of hope and sadness. Vertigo often gets called a critics’ film, which immediately explains why it has triumphed in this particular poll, but that is shorthand for saying that it is a film for people crazy about film, immersed in it, unable to live without it. Citizen Kane is a critics’ film, too, and I won’t pretend that return visits to that flawless, glinting toy train of a movie don’t hold comparable excitement, because they do. Still, it’s pleasing to see the baton passed for a while, and a film chosen that is profound, penetrating and unfathomable rather than (quite) perfectly formed art. Vertigo pioneered that camera effect, known as the dolly zoom, whereby the viewer (the point of view is always Stewart’s) appears to fall into an infinite abyss while remaining quite still. The film itself is that abyss, and we’re still falling into it and for it.