‘Farfetched nonsense,” said the New Yorker. “The film’s first half is too slow and too long,” said Variety. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was released in 1958, the critics were by no means all negative – “One of the most fascinating love stories ever filmed,” said The Hollywood Reporter – but, for the most part, the response was lukewarm. “A plot structure of egg-shell thinness,” wrote Penelope Houston in Sight & Sound.
Fifty-four years later, Vertigo took over from Citizen Kane at the top of a Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films of all time and now, 60 years after its original release, the film’s status seems assured. The plot of Vertigo has more holes than a pair of fishnets, which can be off-putting on a first viewing. But, as with many great films, the story is little more than a skeleton on which to drape all the other, more interesting elements that you begin to see once you can look beyond the villain’s insanely convoluted modus operandi, the protagonist’s unfeasible gullibility and all the other “flaws” that make this the most magnificent, preposterous thriller of them all.
Vertigo was adapted from the 1954 novel D’Entre les Morts (Among the Dead) by French crime-writing duo Boileau-Narcejac, whose credits also included the screenplay for Georges Franju’s classic horror movie Eyes Without a Face (1960), as well as the novel on which Henri-Georges Clouzot based Les Diaboliques (1955), the mother of all dark thrillers with shocking twists, which Hitchcock had, not surprisingly, admired. Set in Paris during the second world war, the book was influenced by another novel, Bruges-la-Morte, Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 masterpiece of Belgian symbolism, in which a grieving widower falls for a dancer who resembles his dead wife and (spoiler!) ends up strangling her with a lock of the dead woman’s hair.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
