The 1958 thriller Vertigo -- the centrepiece of Cinematheque Ontario's current Alfred Hitchcock retrospective -- is widely acclaimed today as the epitome of the director's career as a master of movie suspense.
It was not always so.
"When Vertigo was first released, it wasn't one of Hitchcock's greatest hits," film historian and restoration expert James C. Katz says in an interview on the splendid DVD version of the gorgeous classic, "but time does something to movies and the way that we see them.
"Today, many people regard Vertigo as Hitchcock's masterpiece. But, along the way, it was almost lost to us forever."
It is Katz's and Robert A. Harris' meticulously restored 70 mm version of Vertigo that will be screened tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the York Cinemas (on Eglinton, two blocks east of Yonge).
This is the same version featured on Universal Studios Home Video's DVD, although this colour-saturated, sexually charged, often surreal film never will look as great at home as it will at the York tomorrow.
The rest of the retrospective, which picks up Friday with Downhill and The 39 Steps and continues through June 30, takes place at Jackman Hall in the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Vertigo is extraordinary, and moreso as time gives us perspective. It's not just because it is a great film with a terrific cast, or because of Bernard Herrmann's haunting score, or Robert Burks' technically advanced cinematography, or Saul Bass' influential, jazzy opening titles. In a radical way, the film also embodies many of Hitchcock's singular obsessions and focuses them into an intimate and passionate work.
James Stewart stars as San Francisco detective John (Scottie) Ferguson, a man whose police career is jeopardized when he develops acrophobia, which leads to the condition of vertigo, or a fear of heights. Hitchcock harnessed Stewart's dark side without stripping him of his heroic 'everyman' qualities.
Kim Novak, who replaced Hitchcock's first choice Vera Miles after the actress got pregnant during a production delay caused by Hitchcock's gall-bladder operation, plays two roles.
One is Madeleine Elster, who becomes Scottie's romantic fantasy, an obsession that takes him into murky moral territory. Novak also plays Judy Burton, a seemingly humble store clerk whom Scottie tries to remake into his dreamboat in the sickest, yet most logical, extension of his warped fantasy.
Meanwhile, Scottie is still loved secretly by his best friend and former college lover, Midge, a clothing designer played wonderfully well by Barbara Bel Geddes.
This complex set of relationships, which the original theatrical trailer called "a tangled web of horror," goes so far beyond mere suspense that Vertigo has been criticized for being too slowly paced. That's ridiculous. Hitchcock just took the time to weave his "tangled web" into a truly profound study of human nature with its moral ambiguity and sexual confusion.
The film also is chock-a-block with tiny comic touches and more phallic metaphors than a porno film.
"Over the years," filmmaker Martin Scorsese says on the Vertigo DVD, "I kept being drawn and drawn to the picture like being drawn into a whirlpool of obsession -- a very, very beautiful, comfortable, almost nightmarish obsession."
The obsession continues tomorrow, courtesy of Cinematheque Ontario.
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