Contemporaneous reception
The initial reception expressed in film reviews for Vertigo was mixed. Variety wrote the film showed Hitchcock's "mastery", but felt the film was "too long and slow" for "what is basically only a psychological murder mystery".[72] Similarly, Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times admired the scenery, but found the plot took "too long to unfold" and felt it "bogs down in a maze of detail".[73] Scholar Dan Auiler says that this review "sounded the tone that most popular critics would take with the film".[74] However, the Los Angeles Examiner loved it, admiring the "excitement, action, romance, glamor and [the] crazy, off-beat love story".[75] The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther also gave Vertigo a positive review by explaining that "[the] secret [of the film] is so clever, even though it is devilishly far-fetched."[76] Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post praised the film as a "wonderful weirdie," writing that "Hitchcock has even more fun than usual with trick angles, floor shots and striking use of color. More than once he gives us critical scenes in long shots establishing how he's going to get away with a couple of story tricks."[77] John McCarten of The New Yorker wrote Hitchcock "has never before indulged in such farfetched nonsense."[78]
The New York Post review echoed many critics': "Let's admit it right now. Hitchcock's surfaces are so smooth he thinks he can get away with murder in the logic and realism departments. If you want to tear 'Vertigo' apart, it rips easily. On the other hand, there's no denying that James Stewart's unactorish acting carries a heavy air of reality into the picture, and Kim Novak's somnambulistic behavior, called for by the script, is something she can do to perfection....It's doubtful that 'Vertigo' can take equal rank with the best of the Hitchcock studies—it has too many holes—but it assays high in visual confectionary of place, person, and celluloid wiles."[79]
Contemporaneous response in England was summarized by Charles Barr in his monograph on Vertigo stating: "In England, the reception was if anything rather less friendly. Of the 28 newspaper and magazine reviews that I have looked at, six are, with reservations, favourable, nine are very mixed, and 13 almost wholly negative. Common to all of these reviews is a lack of sympathy with the basic structure and drive of the picture. Even the friendlier ones single out for praise elements that seem, from today's perspective, to be marginal virtues and incidental pleasures – the 'vitality' of the supporting performances (Dilys Powell in The Sunday Times), the slickness with which the car sequences are put together (Isobel Quibley in The Spectator)".[80]
In France, Éric Rohmer noted in Cahiers du Cinéma that "Vertigo, so they say, repelled Americans. French critics, on the contrary, seem to be giving it a warm welcome." Praising the film's formal technique, he wrote that "ideas and forms follow the same road, and it is because the form is pure, beautiful, rigorous, astonishingly rich, and free that we can say that Hitchcock's films, with Vertigo at their head, are about ideas, in the noble, platonic sense of the word."[81]
Additional reasons for the mixed response initially were that Hitchcock fans were not pleased with his departure from the romantic-thriller territory of earlier films, and that the mystery was solved with one-third of the film left to go.[82] Orson Welles disliked the film, telling his friend, director Henry Jaglom, that the movie was "worse" than Rear Window, another film that Welles disliked.[83] In an interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock stated that Vertigo was one of his favourite films, with some reservations.[84] Hitchcock blamed the film's failure on the 49-year-old Stewart looking too old to play a convincing love interest for the 24-year-old Kim Novak.[85]
A young Martin Scorsese viewed the film with his friends during its original run in New York City, and later recalled that "even though the film was not well received at the time... we responded to the film very strongly. [We] didn't know why... but we really went with the picture."[86]
Hitchcock and Stewart received awards at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, including a Silver Seashell for Best Director (tied with Mario Monicelli for Big Deal on Madonna Street (aka Persons Unknown)) and Best Actor (also tied, with Kirk Douglas in The Vikings). The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, in the technical categories[87] Best Art Direction – Black-and-White or Color (Hal Pereira, Henry Bumstead, Samuel M. Comer, Frank McKelvy) and Best Sound (George Dutton).[88]
Re-evaluation
Over time the film has been re-evaluated by film critics and has moved higher in esteem in most critics' opinions. Every ten years since 1952, the British Film Institute's film magazine, Sight & Sound, has asked the world's leading film critics to compile a list of the 10 greatest films of all time.[89] In the 1962 and 1972 polls, Vertigo was not among the top 10 films in voting. Only in 1982 did Vertigo enter the list, and then in 7th place.[90] By 1992 it had advanced to 4th place,[91] by 2002 to 2nd, and in 2012 to 1st place in both the crime genre, and overall, ahead of Citizen Kane in 2nd place; in 2022, the Sight & Sound poll ranked Vertigo 2nd place.[92] In the 2012 Sight & Sound director's poll of the greatest films ever made Vertigo was ranked 7th.[93] In the earlier 2002 version of the list the film ranked 6th among directors.[94][95] In 2022 edition of the list the film ranked 6th in the director's poll.[96] In 1998 Time Out conducted a poll and Vertigo was voted the 5th greatest film of all time.[97] The Village Voice ranked Vertigo at No. 3 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.[98] Entertainment Weekly voted it the 19th Greatest film of all time in 1999.[99] In January 2002, the film was voted at No. 96 on the list of the "Top 100 Essential Films of All Time" by the National Society of Film Critics.[100][101] In 2009, the film was ranked at No. 10 on Japanese film magazine Kinema Junpo's Top 10 Non-Japanese Films of All Time list.[102] In 2022, Time Out magazine ranked the film at No.15 on their list of "The 100 best thriller films of all time".[103]
Commenting upon the 2012 results, the magazine's editor Nick James said that Vertigo was "the ultimate critics' film. It is a dream-like film about people who are not sure who they are but who are busy reconstructing themselves and each other to fit a kind of cinema ideal of the ideal soul-mate."[11] In recent years, critics have noted that the casting of James Stewart as a character who becomes disturbed and obsessive ultimately enhances the film's unconventionality and effectiveness as suspense, since Stewart had previously been known as an actor of warmhearted roles.[104]
Already in the 1960s, the French Cahiers du Cinéma critics began re-evaluating Hitchcock as a serious artist, rather than just a populist showman. The film ranked 8th on Cahiers du Cinéma's Top 10 Films of the Year List in 1959.[105] However, even François Truffaut's important 1962 book of interviews with Hitchcock (not published in English until 1967) devotes only a few pages to Vertigo. Dan Auiler has suggested that the real beginning of Vertigo's rise in adulation was the British-Canadian scholar Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films (1968), which calls the film "Hitchcock's masterpiece to date and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us".[106]
Adding to its mystique was the fact that Vertigo was one of five Hitchcock-owned films removed from circulation in 1973. When Vertigo was re-released in theaters in October 1983, and then on home video in October 1984, it achieved an impressive commercial success and laudatory reviews.[107] Similarly adulatory reviews were written for the October 1996 showing of a restored print in 70mm and DTS sound at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.[108] In his 1996 review of the film, film critic Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four and included it in his Great Movies list.[109]
A small minority of critics have expressed dissenting opinions. In his 2004 book Blockbuster, British film critic Tom Shone suggested that Vertigo's critical re-evaluation has led to excessive praise, and argued for a more measured response. Faulting Sight & Sound for "perennially" putting the film on the list of best-ever films, he wrote, "Hitchcock is a director who delights in getting his plot mechanisms buffed up to a nice humming shine, and so the Sight and Sound team praise the one film of his in which this is not the case – it's all loose ends and lopsided angles, its plumbing out on display for the critic to pick over at his leisure."[110]
In 1989, Vertigo was recognized as a "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" film by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in the first year of the registry's voting.[111]
In 2005, Vertigo came in second (to Goodfellas) in British magazine Total Film's book 100 Greatest Movies of All Time.[112] In 2008, an Empire poll of readers, actors, and critics named it the 40th greatest movie ever made.[113] The film was Voted at No. 8 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008.[114] In 2010, The Guardian ranked it as the 3rd-best crime film of all time.[115] Vertigo ranked 3rd in BBC's 2015 list of the 100 greatest American films.[116]
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 93% based on 87 reviews, with an average rating of 8.90/10. The website's critics consensus reads,"An unpredictable scary thriller that doubles as a mournful meditation on love, loss, and human comfort".[117] As of February 2024, Vertigo is one of only fourteen films with a 100 (perfect) score on the movie critic aggregator website, Metacritic (two other Hitchcock films, Notorious and Rear Window, are also on the list).[118]
The most recent edition of the American Film Institute's top 100 films of all time, released in 2007, placed Vertigo at #9 up 52 positions from its placement at #61 in the original 1998 listing.
American Film Institute recognition
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (1998) #61
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills (2001) #18
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions (2002) #18
- AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores (2005) #12
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) (2007) #9
- AFI's 10 Top 10 (2008) #1 Mystery[119]
The San Francisco locations have become celebrated amongst the film's fans, with organised tours across the area.[f] In March 1997, the cultural French magazine Les Inrockuptibles published a special issue about Vertigo's locations in San Francisco, Dans le décor, which lists and describes all actual locations.[120]
Director Martin Scorsese has listed Vertigo as one of his favorite films of all time.[121]
The renewed public appreciation for Vertigo is accompanied by a growing body of academic scholarship. Conferences like the Annual International Vertigo conference, for instance, showcase this trend, as evidenced by its 2018 event at Trinity College Dublin.[122]
Critical works on Vertigo
- Variety review from 1958[123]
- Robin Wood's chapter on "Vertigo" in Hitchcock's Films[124]
- Molly Haskell's essay, "With Paintbrush and Mirror: 'Vertigo' & 'As You Desire Me'" in The Village Voice[125]
- Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, popularizing the concept of the male gaze[126]
- Roger Ebert's 1996 Review[127]
Classification as film noir
Critical opinion is divided on whether Vertigo should be considered a film noir. Some consider it a film noir on the basis of plot and tone and various motifs, despite its having a modernist graphic design typical of the 1950s and a more modern set design, which would otherwise remove it from the category of film noir.[128] Others say the combination of color and the specificity of Hitchcock's vision exclude it from the category.[129] On the general issue of noir and visual style, see Ballinger and Graydon (2007).[130] Christopher (1998)[131] and Silver and Ward (1992),[132] for instance, do not include Vertigo in their filmographies. Ottoson (1981)[133] does not include Vertigo in his canon. By contrast, Hirsch (2001) describes Vertigo as among those Hitchcock films that are "richly, demonstrably noir".[134]
