Three days ago The Washington Post had an article about Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Vertigo (1958).
reader comments:
// As far as I'm concerned, this movie is one of Hitchcock's masterpieces---rich with imagery, lush with music, and steeped in suspense.
// "those maddeningly aimless driving scenes around San Francisco"
Are you crazy? That's why I've watched and rewatched this amazing movie so many times. Every driving scene is a work of art, as are the real vintage cars in every scene. I strained to read what kind of car Scotty was driving until I found it: the DeSoto Firedome.
So beautiful, so poetic, so true to the times.
Scotty's apartment is classic mid-century modern, a style never to be seen again. This is the greatest homage to San Francisco ever made and is made even more poignant by the city's great troubles of today.
The graveyard scene at Mission Dolores was so eerie that I just had to visit when I went to the city.
Somehow, Hitchcock even captured the feel of the air, which distinguishes the Bay Area from any other area.
As a great artist, Hitchcock emulated the paintings of the surrealist de Chirico, one of the great portrayers of mood, shadow and angles. "Masterpiece" does not quite capture this amazing film.
// The film was unsettling partly because it was released at a time of geographic and cultural change. The Dodgers and Giants had just moved to California and statehood for Alaska and Hawaii was on the horizon.
The familiar and contained comforts of the 48-star flag and continental sporting primacy extending west only as far as St. Louis were being blown up, and Hitchcock was burning Mission motifs and Spanish tile roofs into viewers' brains.
Folks in the eastern U.S. must have been wondering what would happen next in that changing and foreboding part of the country with a quality of light all its own.
The answer being: nothing that should concern you. Save your worries. Castro's coming.
// Hitch really captured the eerieness of mid-century Northern California in movies like Vertigo, The Birds and Shadow of a Doubt.
// Rear Window is the movie that made me fall in love with Hitchcock, and since then I've found many other films of his---many great ones---to love, but Vertigo remains his most mysterious, unsettling, and beautiful.
Not everything about the characters' behavior makes sense, some film techniques are jarring, the color choices are bold and often unnatural, but that's kind of the point.
I find something new in this movie every time I watch it. Definitely one of the greatest films ever made.
-30-
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