If you’re not a subscriber to World, you should be. It’s one of the handful of “must-read” magazines for me. I’ve started to contribute occasional movie reviews there. Here’s my review of one of the most acclaimed films of all time.
VERTIGO
Once a decade, Sight and Sound magazine from the British Film Institute, polls an international group of film professionals and ranks the greatest films of all time. Roger Ebert highly regarded this list, claiming it to be the only one that matters to “serious movie people.” For five straight decades (1962-2002), Citizen Kane (a 1941 drama starring Orson Welles) occupied the highest spot. But in the 2012 poll, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film, Vertigo, supplanted Kane as the Sight and Sound pick for greatest film of all time.
Recently released on Blu-ray after undergoing an extensive digital restoration, Vertigo tells the story of a police detective from San Francisco, John Ferguson (James Stewart), who, after a traumatic experience, is forced into early retirement because of severe acrophobia (fear of heights). An old college friend asks him to trail his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), a young woman on the verge of a mental breakdown.
It is difficult to determine what part of Vertigo‘s allure is most crucial to its critical acclaim. The cinematography is outstanding, offering an array of San Francisco sights and sounds. Bernard Hermann’s score is eerily beautiful; the horns and strings create a quiet sense of dread before swelling into madness. The costumes and colors are vibrant, purposefully chosen to parallel themes throughout the film. As a forerunner to movies like The Sixth Sense, the plot includes a twist so surprising one can never watch the film the same way again, a turn that immediately suffuses Stewart and Novak’s performances with layers of complexity.
Meanwhile, the story touches on several big ideas: the loss of dignity from unemployment, the craftiness of the human heart in devising murderous schemes, the frailty of the human psyche, the exploitation of women, and the toll that forbidden love takes on a person. Vertigo is a deeply psychological film that ends with a tortured cry for justice amidst a palpable sense of romantic longing and loss. Viewers today may find the first hour to be too slow and plodding, but Vertigo is the kind of film that rewards patience and careful attention.
This article originally appeared in the Sept. 20, 2014, issue of WORLD magazine. Reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2014 WORLD News Group. All rights reserved.
