Detective Scotty Elster (James Stewart), recuperating from a traumatic vertigo event is contacted by an old acquaintance, Gavin Elster (Tom Elmore) and hired to tail his disturbed wife Madeline (Kim Novak) to get at the root cause of the malady. She follows a routine daily by driving her ostentatious Rolls Royce about San Francisco and visiting a museum when one day she decides to toss herself into San Francisco Bay. Elster rescues her and the two draw close but she remains guarded.
Vertigo's greatest mystery to me is its late rise in prominence over the decades where Sight and Sound called it the finest film in history in a critics poll. In my opinion it is not even the best of his output during the 50s. Stewart as vulnerable failure is more than adequate but Novak comes across bland and unemotive. The plot overall is a touch improbable and there's a hint Hitch paints himself into a corner by utilizing flashback rather than tie matters up at the end of the picture.
Similar in many ways to Chinatown (74) and directed by Hitchcock acolyte, Roman Polanski, I find Vertigo the inferior work in which the student's work outclasses the master's in nearly everyway. An OK Hitch, its king of the hill status more than dubious, however.
Vertigo's greatest mystery to me is its late rise in prominence over the decades where Sight and Sound called it the finest film in history in a critics poll. In my opinion it is not even the best of his output during the 50s. Stewart as vulnerable failure is more than adequate but Novak comes across bland and unemotive. The plot overall is a touch improbable and there's a hint Hitch paints himself into a corner by utilizing flashback rather than tie matters up at the end of the picture.
Similar in many ways to Chinatown (74) and directed by Hitchcock acolyte, Roman Polanski, I find Vertigo the inferior work in which the student's work outclasses the master's in nearly everyway. An OK Hitch, its king of the hill status more than dubious, however.