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Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo": The Greatest Film Ever?

Vertigo is pretty good but Star Wars is better.

It's not on the list? What?!
 
Um, "Rope", anyone? Much better. "Vertigo" is a t least twenty minutes too long. It just should stop way sooner than it does.
 
doubleohfive said:
Emher said:
Um, "Rope", anyone? Much better. "Vertigo" is a t least twenty minutes too long. It just should stop way sooner than it does.
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Blasphemy!
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Which part? :lol: I honestly felt when I saw "Vertigo" that it should stop sooner then it does, that it should stop with just us knowing that she is indeed the same woman as the one he thinks she resembles and leave us at that. I no have issues with pacing or length otherwise, it's just that I never felt the last bit added that much.

Just my opinion. ;)
 
As mentioned months before on a brief but well-thought-out post, the top five films of all time will probably always be PSYCHO, ALIEN, THE GODFATHER, THE WIZARD OF OZ and THE EXORCIST, in that order. And THE RIGHT STUFF is still sixth.
 
Rope is okay, but the play lost its teeth when it was watered down for the screen, and even Hitchcock admitted that the attempt at a single take didn't always suit the material.

As for Vertigo, it doesn't make sense to me to lose the end; that's when Scottie overcomes his title condition!
 
Harvey said:
Personally, I prefer North by Northwest, but it's easy to see why Vertigo gets so much critical attention. One, it wasn't a popular hit when it was released (critically or commercially), so there's been a movement to "rescue" the film from relative obscurity (Hitchcock even had the film removed from circulation for a number of years after it's initial release). Second, it rather dramatically personifies some of Hitchcock's own personal obsessions. These often manifest in his movies, but rarely as clearly as they do in Vertigo.
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Aye. From Wiki:
In his 2004 book Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, however, British film critic Tom Shone argued that Vertigo's critical re-evaluation has led to excessive praise, and argued for a more measured response. Faulting Sight and Sound for "perennially" putting the film on the list of best-ever films, he wrote that "Hitchcock is a director who delights in getting his plot mechanisms buffed up to a nice humming shine, and so the Sight and Sound team praise the one film of his in which this is not the case – it's all loose ends and lopsided angles, its plumbing out on display for the critic to pick over at his leisure."

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Sounds right to moi. Also, is it just me, or was Kim Novak just not very attractive in it? Like many of Hitch's movies, Vertigo is all about obsession with a woman, but could it be that the lack of a first-rate beauty such as Bergman, Kelly or Fontaine lets the viewer of the hook to a certain extent, that we don't identify with Scottie too closely, and are therefore freer to bask in the atmosphere of the movie?
 
Harvey said:
Rope is okay, but the play lost its teeth when it was watered down for the screen, and even Hitchcock admitted that the attempt at a single take didn't always suit the material.

As for Vertigo, it doesn't make sense to me to lose the end; that's when Scottie overcomes his title condition!
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Except nobody cared as much about that as they did Jeff confronting the murderer in the dark and from a wheelchair in Rear Window.
 
Well, yeah, but Rear Window is a more entertaining movie. I don't think Vertigo is any less exceptional (it's easily among Hitchcock's top ten if not top five), but it isn't hard for me to figure out which one I'm more likely to watch on a whim among the two (and, again, if I could pick any of his films, North by Northwest runs away with the prize).
 
I'm with those who love Rear Window--particularly for the incomparable Grace Kelly, and her excellent (and very sexy) cameraderie with Ol' Jimmy. It's one of my favorite Hitch films. I actually did a paper on Grace's performance for my "Great Performances In Film" class, last Spring.

As for Vertigo...well, for much of the film, I wasn't sure what to make of it. BUT...the final sequence is Hitchcock at his best, IMO. I remember watching the camera pull away from Jimmy, looking down from the tower...the bell tolling loudly...the Paramount logo...fade to black.

I just sat there, and went..."Whoa...!"

It's one of the most shocking (yet inevitable) and heart-pounding endings I've ever seen--and it made the movie, as wierd as the rest of it was.

But...is it the greatest film ever?
(Shakes head)
 
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Lonemagpie said:
It's not even Hitch's best movie, IMO [...]
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Agreed. It's brilliant, certainly, like almost everything Hitchcock ever did, but I'd put Rear Window, Suspicion and North by Northwest (at a minimum; Spellbound is another that springs to mind, but that may be because it has Gregory Peck in it :D) ahead of it.
Lonemagpie said:
[...] but anything that breaks the imposed stranglehold of Citizen Kane...
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Amen to that. IMO Kane, along with Gone With the Wind, is the most overrated and overpraised movie ever made. But to each their own.

Emher said:
Um, "Rope", anyone? Much better.
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Eh. It's a good movie, but IMO Lifeboat was a much more successful experiment (so to speak). But again - to each their own. :bolian:
 
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