Vertigo
2 Oscar Nominations·AFI #9·BFI #2·National Film Registry
Rent/Purchase
A retired San Francisco detective suffering from acrophobia investigates the strange activities of an old friend's wife, all the while becoming dangerously obsessed with her.
What critics thought
One of cinema's most dramatic critical reversals: panned or met with indifference on release for being slow and implausible, Vertigo has since climbed to the very top of critical canons, a journey that is itself part of what critics now discuss. The gap between how audiences and press received it in 1958 and what scholars and critics make of it today is the real story — the film's obsessive, lopsided structure, once held against it, is now the thing most praised.
“too long and slow”
Variety
“never before indulged in such farfetched nonsense”
John McCarten·The New Yorker
“Hitchcock has even more fun than usual with trick angles, floor shots and striking use of color. More than once he gives us critical scenes in long shots establishing how he's going to get away with a couple of story tricks.”
Richard L. Coe·The Washington Post
“ideas and forms follow the same road, and it is because the form is pure, beautiful, rigorous, astonishingly rich, and free that we can say that Hitchcock's films, with Vertigo at their head, are about ideas, in the noble, platonic sense of the word.”
Éric Rohmer·Cahiers du Cinéma
Genres
Mystery, Romance, Thriller
Cast & Crew
DirectorAlfred Hitchcock
StarringJames Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, Henry Jones
ComposerBernard Herrmann
Vertigo
2 Oscar Nominations·AFI #9·BFI #2·National Film Registry
A retired San Francisco detective suffering from acrophobia investigates the strange activities of an old friend's wife, all the while becoming dangerously obsessed with her.
What critics thought
One of cinema's most dramatic critical reversals: panned or met with indifference on release for being slow and implausible, Vertigo has since climbed to the very top of critical canons, a journey that is itself part of what critics now discuss. The gap between how audiences and press received it in 1958 and what scholars and critics make of it today is the real story — the film's obsessive, lopsided structure, once held against it, is now the thing most praised.
“too long and slow”
Variety
“never before indulged in such farfetched nonsense”
John McCarten·The New Yorker
“Hitchcock has even more fun than usual with trick angles, floor shots and striking use of color. More than once he gives us critical scenes in long shots establishing how he's going to get away with a couple of story tricks.”
Richard L. Coe·The Washington Post
“ideas and forms follow the same road, and it is because the form is pure, beautiful, rigorous, astonishingly rich, and free that we can say that Hitchcock's films, with Vertigo at their head, are about ideas, in the noble, platonic sense of the word.”
Éric Rohmer·Cahiers du Cinéma
Genres
Mystery, Romance, Thriller
Cast & Crew
DirectorAlfred Hitchcock
StarringJames Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, Henry Jones
ComposerBernard Herrmann
Rent/Purchase