alfred hitchcock's VERTIGO (1958)

the Tennessee Theatre's "Summer Movie Magic" series is once again in full swing, populating our local treasure's silver screen with everything from perennial snoozers (Gone With The Wind) to more adventurous selections (Thunder Road's fiftieth anniversary) and underseen classics (It Happened One Night), and this weekend in particular brings perhaps the most exciting, must-see entry in this year's varied lineup: Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece-among-masterpieces, Vertigo.

the story of an acrophobic former detective (Jimmy Stewart) tasked with tailing an associate's mysteriously afflicted wife (Kim Novak), Vertigo met a lukewarm reception upon release in 1958, and in a way it's not hard to see why; Hitch's genteel psychosexual melodrama contrasts rather drastically with the crowd-pleasing potboilers he'd been putting out for more than twenty years at that point, and the film is indeed so introverted that it hands out the solution to the central mystery well before it needs to simply because it serves the psychology.

this is not to suggest that Hitchcock sets aside his Master Of Suspense mantle for a single moment; Vertigo still exudes pure mystery (it was, in fact, recently named the genre's greatest film by the AFI) and beguiles with every twist and turn. the difference, though, is that Hitchcock (with screenwriter Samuel A. Taylor, adapting a French novel allegedly written specifically for Hitchcock) here narrows his focus to the mind -- Stewart's darkening obsession, Novak's fractured identity -- and emerges with a more profound mysteriousness than exists elsewhere in his storied body of work.

what may be the key to Vertigo's ever-expanding reputation, though, is that such internalized intrigue leaves Hitchcock free to dabble carefully with the look and feel of the film, and the result is quite simply perfection. Stewart, composer Bernard Hermann and cinematographer Robert Burks all collaborated fruitfully with Hitchcock throughout their careers, but Vertigo remains the deepest, most challenging work any of the four men ever produced. If North By Northwest is Alfred Hitchcock's gift to the audience, and Psycho his gift to the cinema, then Vertigo is nothing less than his gift to art at large, and the opportunity to see it on the big screen should not be passed up.

(from the KNOXVILLE VOICE)