Post the Ninth

I am often asked, during my english seminars, for my favourite film of all time. I am a real film fan, and although I haven´t seen thousands of them , the total number must be pretty high by now.  I must also confess to being a huge fan of the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Not so much the notorious films , Psycho, The Birds and so on, but the other (for me) more interesting works.  

So, I have been conducting a review and I have made my decision. It has to be ..... 

Vertigo, starring Jiímmy Stewart and Kim Novac. What an incredible film this is.

This film works at so many different levels. Ok, so the plot is a little contrived and implausible, but that´s not the point. The themes are so powerful and well integrated that the whole piece hangs together as Hitchcock´s masterpiece.  It is by far his most emotional , atmospheric and poetic film.  

One could discuss the mechanics of the story and the famous twist. But it´s the underlying themes that really grab my attention. The good guy (Stewart), carrying the image of affability from his other films,  is thrust into a narrative so strange that he is slowly revealed in the viewer´s eyes as possesing all of the insecurities, weaknesses and obsessions of a real man. He´s a nice guy, but also not. 

Like many men, he has relationships with women, but they have never worked out. He has a long time female friend who loves him , but he is not really interested. He meets a blonde vision of a woman and becomes obsessed with her. He then `loses` her (she dies , he thinks, because of his weakness). Stewart then spends the second half of the film looking for and then finding a second woman who looks uncannily like the first. He then, most disturbingly, literally re-makes her into a replica of the first woman, his great lost obsession. But at the very end, he loses her too, as she falls to her death . For the first half of film, Stewart is the familiar affable, if perplexed, hero. But he also carries a feeling of guilt for the accidental death of a fellow police officer.  In the second half his darker side is revealed as he falls into a spiral of obsession and obsessive behaviour. It´s  uncomfortable to watch .

What we realise too is that the first and second woman are actually the same person. Judy was simply acting out the role of the first. It is this fact which drives the tragedy to its conclusion. She is, we discover, guilty both of deception and aiding and abetting a murder !  She had impersonated the ´mad´ wife of an old friend of Stewarts ( her name is Madelaine!)  She does this in order to con Stewart into witnessing the wifes´ suicide in order to conceal the murder of the real wife, by her husband. At the end of the film it is left open as to whether the husband will finally be ´caught´. 

Judy had spent the whole film as a guilty accomplice to a murder. Her attraction to Stewart, the ex-policeman, seems partly driven by a need to confess, for salvation from her sins.

For once in a thriller it´s not the criminals or the justice system which are central concerns.  There is no judicial process in this film, at least not from mortal men.   

It´s a film about relationships, image , idealism, love and longing, sexual attraction, salvation, acting and pretence, cinema itself, guilt , death , judgement and (divine ?) retribution.  

And it´s a truly magnificent achievement.