REVIEW: VERTIGO

There is something odd about the film Vertigo. Even while watching it, you're aware that it's not quite right. It looks and feels like a glossy 1950's private eye story, but it's just - wrong. Unsettling. Like coffee made with soya milk, or a warm toilet seat, or that friendly tone phone marketers use when they want you to think they are your BEST FRIEND and not some random bugger out to sell you crap.

Now I don't ordinarily mention composers because writing about music is hard for someone with my limited range of description. I say things like, "That bit where it goes doo-doo-DOO-DOOO-doo is great". But, trust me, the score by Bernard Hermann (Psycho, Taxi Driver) is brilliant. Especially the bit where it goes doo doo doo. Sinister yet seductive, it creates an atmosphere of unease that runs throughout the film, as the title animation shows a man falling into a series of unending spirals.

But then it's into the movie! And what a start it is, as good old Jimmy Stewart chases a criminal over rooftops. Then he loses his step, falls, and causes another cop to plunge to his death. Jimmy is pensioned out of the force with a guilt complex and no head for heights at all. It's at this point he's hired by an old pal who is concerned about his wife's sanity. She's obsessed with a relative who died in a suicidal fall from a old mission tower some decades earlier. So Jimmy begins to follow the wife, who spends her days drifting about in a depressed manner. When she attempts suicide at San Francisco bay, Jimmy has to intervene and the two of them fall in love.

So far, it seems like a pretty straightforward romance/mystery right? But then Jimmy's obsession deepens (evidenced by a bizarre animated nightmare sequence). The eerie, dreamlike direction is incredible, and leaves you with a feeling of vertigo all of your own. There's a curious colour scheme to the film, with blood-red scenery seen through deathly green tint, while the camera spirals and swirls around the actors. In this film the camera really is like another actor, altering your perception of what's going on.

Hitchcock described Vertigo as being about necrophilia, which is typical of the man. I think what he meant was that it's about an unwillingness to let go of the dead and the effect that can have on the living. By the end of the film, Stewart has become obsessed with recreating the past as a way of fixing it. What he doesn't realise is that the past is unchangeable - by recreating events he's condemned to relive them, like do-it-yourself Groundhog Day.

Jimmy - who you can normally rely on to play Mr. Level-Headed and Reasonable - gives an incredibly brave performance as the unhinged Scotty. There has to be some of Hitchcock in Jimmy's performance - especially in the way Hitch would "re-model" all his actresses. (Hitchcock's relationships with his leading ladies is quite disturbing - especially poor old Tippi Hedren). Vertigo is a surreal, intense movie - standing alongside Night of the Hunter and Blue Velvet as films that melt the divide between audience and author and take you into the mind of the film-maker for a couple of hours. Perhaps not a place you want to be, but fascinating anyway.