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Vertigo More at IMDbPro »

12 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
You can't get to the bottom of it, 29 December 2003

Author: Framescourer from London, UK

Jimmy Stewart transcends his form of Rear Window here, and needs to. Vertigo is an elusive love story and the character of Scotty shuttles more actively, yet more subtly between the gravitation of his desire for Kim Novak's Madeleine and the peaceful stasis of his retirement. The chief conspirator in the mystery and power of the film is the music. Bernard Hermann's score is a paradigm of the filmscore rendered in post-Tristan hoch-romanticism, rich in both power AND nuance. Where the simplest passages of expositional action would require a low profile underscore the music has an agenda already looking ahead to the power and vertiginous confusion of the film's intent. Watch the flower shop sequence again; it's got it all, visual dialogue, cunning use of foreshortened shots and mirrors and overwhelming colour both visually and sonically. And in a relatively minor sequence.

So Hitchcock is employing all his favourite devices and to great effect. Symbolism is no passenger either. The symbol that is impossible to miss throughout is that of colour. A 1996 analytic essay (by Jim Emerson, available online) outlines these in great detail, from the greens of passion and reds of warning to the subsiduary colours for guilt (blue/grey) and peace or comfort (yellow/beige). I was reminded of British colourist Howard Hodgkin's canvas Lovers (1992), an Apollonian/Dionysian tsunami of red and green as iridescent as the Technicolour tints and filters used in the film.

So the film is about the doppelganger tension inside a character - the wrenching of his alternates. Should Scotty abandon his rocking chair and sunset retirement in search of not only Madeleine but whatever it is that makes him pursue her (a sort of meta-lust)? When he does, which we all want him to do, will he be able to bring it back around and make sense of it all for us? Well, just when we think he has, Hitchcock blows the cosy moral cadence apart again. The film is as daring in its ending as in its conception and execution and is surely a touchstone of great cinema - great art - as a result. 9/10

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