Vertigo

So I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo the other night. This summer has been a regular Hitchcock retrospective for me, as I think I’ve seen a majority of his movies over the last couple of months. I have to say that Vertigo is my least favorite of those I’ve seen up to this point. That having been said, this is the first time I’ve seen Vertigo, and I’ve found that in the case of most of Hitchcock’s movies that I’ve enjoyed them more the second time around. But for some reason, I suspect that this won’t be the case with this one.

Overall, Vertigo was a disappointment. James Stewart plays a San Francisco detective, recently retired from the police force because he now suffers from vertigo. His fear of heights was brought on by an incident in which a fellow officer dies from falling off the roof of a building. An old college buddy looks him up and wants him to keep tabs on the man’s wife (Kim Novak). The man suspects his wife might be possessed by the spirit of her grandmother, and he fears that his wife will follow in her grandmother’s footsteps and take her own life. So he wants Stewart to trail his wife to see if he can find out if she really is channeling her dead grandmother. Inevitably, Stewart begins to fall for her, and his life goes downhill from there. The movie takes some twists and turns after that, but giving out more information is giving a little too much of the plot away.

My first complaint is the title of the movie. While Stewart’s vertigo does factor into the plot, and arguably at key moments, for the most part his affliction is non-existent. Not a big deal, you may argue, but if you are going to call a movie Vertigo, that kind of implies that it may factor into the movie more than a couple of times. A minor complaint I realize, but it was an irritant for me nonetheless. And while I’m on the subject of irritants, here’s another. What was the deal with Kim Novak’s eyebrows? She is supposed to be this gorgeous woman that Stewart’s character begins to fall for. But every time I looked at her I couldn’t take my eyes off the giant black monstrous collections of hair above her eyes. Her eyebrows were huge, and the fact that they were jet black compared to her bleach blonde hair made those suckers really stand out. Maybe that was in fashion back in the late 50’s (although I doubt it), but they are just distracting today.

I guess my biggest beef is that this movie had so much potential. Overall all of the elements are present for a great movie, but somehow they just don’t seem to fit together all that well. And that’s not a dig on Hitchcock. From a technical standpoint, the movie is perfect. The man knew how to make a movie. In this case I think it was the story that dragged this movie down. I suspect had the screenplay been tweaked just a little bit more, this would have been a far superior film.