Recently I re-watched both Citizen Kane and Vertigo, with the purpose of trying to understand how it is that Vertigo could have replaced Kane as Best Movie Ever in the Sight and Sound poll (2012). When that poll first came out I was stunned: I had never thought that Vertigo is even remotely comparable to Kane, and indeed had never seen it as one of Hitchcock’s best — top ten for sure, but I don’t think top five among his movies. Thus my re-watching. I really wanted to give Vertigo my best attention, my most sympathetic attention, and I think I managed that, but at the end I found myself just as puzzled as ever about the movie’s rise to such eminence.
I think I can make my point by comparing it not to Kane but to another Hitchcock movie from four years earlier, Rear Window. Now, to be sure, Rear Window is a more lighthearted movie than Vertigo, so they are not tonally equivalent, but there are interesting points of comparison. For instance, both of them feature Jimmy Stewart dangling in the air by his hands and then falling from a height — which is sort of peculiar, when you think about it.
About tone: I actually think that the consistently sober tone of Vertigo, its narrow emotional range, — and by that I mean the emotions of the audience as well as the characters — is a weak point. One of Hitchcock’s greatest filmmaking virtues is his ability to display a visual playfulness even when he’s telling a serious story: we perceive an evident delight in the construction of scenes and shots that can bring a smile to the viewer’s face even in the most tragic of films. In his famous interviews with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock expresses some annoyance at the negativity of the British press towards Psycho, and the form of his complaint is noteworthy: he says that his critics don’t have a sense of humor. That is, they didn’t see the wit in the construction of the story, the framing of its shots, its cuts and the sequence of its scenes. And I think he’s right about that. Psycho is in a strange way a witty movie — as is, in a more obvious way, Rear Window, which repeatedly takes us with absolute assurance from laughter to profound tension and back to laughter again. The scene in which Grace Kelly sneaks into the murderer’s apartment and is found there by the murderer — in full sight of a helpless and agonized Stewart — is one of the most suspenseful scenes in the history of movies.
There is none of this tonal variety in Vertigo, which is among the least playful of Hitchcock’s films. There are two moments of real visual imagination: the famous descending-into-madness sequence (which for the record I don’t think quite comes off) and the trick — cleverly achieved by dollying the camera backwards while simultaneously zooming in — of representing the feeling of vertigo as Stewart looks down a staircase.
But aside from those two small things, it’s a visually indifferent movie. Yes, San Francisco is nice to look at, but Hitchcock just … shot San Francisco.
Contrast that to the constant visual stimulation that we get in Rear Window, most obviously in the justly famous opening sequence, where the movement of the camera tells a detailed story, filling us in on everything that we need to know to appreciate who our protagonist is and how he got into the situation that he’s in. And then, when he makes the phone call that sets the plot in motion, the camera restlessly pans around the courtyard, introducing us to all the people who will be the object of our protagonist’s voyeuristic attentions for the rest of the film. Vertigo has absolutely nothing like this, and it’s not because Hitchcock fell off in his abilities. North by Northwest is full of such visual interest. Vertigo simply strikes me as a workmanlike job of filmmaking. And I don’t see how a movie so visually unremarkable can be thought of as one of the greatest films ever made.
And in addition to being visually mundane, its pacing is inconsistent: Hitchcock has some trouble getting us plausibly and vividly from the first tragic visit to the mission to the second one. Rear Window, by contrast, is perfectly paced, and every shot counts.
(Parenthetical note: The two movies, in addition to featuring a Dangling Stewart, have a number of odd correspondences. I’ll just note one: In Vertigo we wonder why he’s obsessed with the female lead, and in Rear Window we wonder why he isn’t.)
I’m going to stop there, because I don’t want to overstress the criticism: Vertigo is a terrific movie. Top-ten Hitchcock is by definition exceptional. But it has significant flaws that the movies it’s now frequently compared to simply don’t have.
The best thing about Vertigo, in my view, is the final shot, which indeed perfectly displays Hitchcock’s famously malicious wit: it is a brilliantly creepy moment, as we see our protagonist finally delivered from his obsession and his fear — at the cost of the life of the woman he’s obsessed with. That’s fantastic, but I think Hitchcock does not get us to that point with his customary assurance and visual flair. I don’t think Vertigo is nearly as good a movie as Rear Window, or Psycho, or North by Northwest, or Notorious, or even Shadow of a Doubt. It’s very good Hitchcock but not top Hitchcock, and the idea that it is superior to Citizen Kane, and Rules of the Game, and Tokyo Story, and 2001 — well, that’s just incomprehensible to me.
