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Signature Classic |
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Vertigo With Special Guest C.O. “Doc” Erickson Sponsored by Mills Plaza Properties 1958 | Not Rated | Mystery, Thriller | d. Alfred Hitchcock James Stewart, Kim Novak |
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| James Stewart comes by his fear of heights honestly. At the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, he’s a cop hanging by his fingertips from a building ledge. Stewart spends the rest of the film hanging by even less. After witnessing his partner fall to his death, Stewart just can’t get his legs under him. As a favor to a friend, he stoops to private-eyeing. His first assignment: follow a lady, Kim Novak, and try not to fall in love. But this is no ordinary tail job. The lady is haunted by the portrait (and perhaps spirit) of a 19th century San Francisco heiress. She’s lovely, but suicidal and drawn to heights - a bad combination for Stewart’s crippling fear. What is worse, Stewart’s eyes start to play tricks on him (another bad trait for a private eye), and he spirals into an obsessive purgatory, carried along by Bernhard Herrmann’s vortex of a score. Try as he might to resist, all paths lead to the foot of the most famous winding staircase in cinema, and another long drop. The American writer Ambrose Bierce once noted that, “ghosts are the outward and visible sign of unseen fears”. Hitchcock seems to have understood this in his bones and the entire film is sublime, marked by the uncanny, and like Stewart, increasingly uncoupled from the physical world. It’s as if a single moment in time has been suspended and then expanded, to fill the void between the parapet Stewart once hung from, and the hard reality of the pavement below. Truly, Hitchcock at the height (or depth) of his powers. - Charles Horak | ||