Vertigo 50th Anniversary

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo celebrates its 50^th anniversary, a film which eventually was deemed a classic after having a luke warm critical reception during the time of its release and under performed at the box office.  The crux of the story was "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again, boy loses girl again".   Vertigo was the film that introduced the use of the dolly zoom – an in-camera effect that distorts perspective. The lead actor played by Jimmy Stewart is an early retired detective suffering from a combination of acrophobia (an extreme fear of heights) and vertigo (a false sense of rotational movement).

The girl is Hollywood starlet Kim Novak   playing a dual role of Madeleine and Judy, in this American film noir.  Novak is the femme fatale who psychologically fractures Scottie, Stewart’s character and propels him further down this spiraling mystery over his obsession of woman who looks like someone else.     

The screenplay was adapted from a French novel titled ‘From among the dead’, French director Francois Truffaut who extensively interviewed Hitchcock and written a book of the auteur-director, suggested that possibly the authors of the novel had specifically written the story for Hitchcock, in which they denied. Behind the scenes Vertigo imitates Hitchcock's own sadistic treatment of actors, directly mirroring his trademark production of fetishised cool blondes. 

As for its female star, Kim Novak saw this script as an analogue of the Hollywood star system in which she was a property.  In a subversive way Vertigo 50 years later solidifies the historical purpose of the #metoo movement,  Critics  have interpreted Vertigo variously as "a tale of male aggression and visual control; as a map of female Oedipal trajectory; as a deconstruction of the male construction of femininity and of masculinity itself; as a stripping bare of the mechanisms of directorial, Hollywood studio and colonial oppression.

Artistically, Vertigo for its time was bold and revolutionary, breaking cinematic ground as did Orsen Well's Citizen Kane.  in 2007, AFI ranked Vertigo as the ninth-greatest American movie of all time.