a thread for hitchcock's 'vertigo'

Oh, good call on Midge in Mad Men. I mean, the Mad Men opening montage of the silhouette guy falling is a direct Vertigo reference, right?

I think Vertigo is a great art installation and a middling movie. Your oldest kid is right!

It's an interesting question whether it's supposed to make you feel uncomfortable. Hitchcock wanted his audiences to feel scared, sure, but he was also firmly on the entertainment side, I think if you had suggested to him he was trying to challenge his audience he'd have reacted with disgust. He's def using Jimmy Stewart for shock value in the way everyone's described, but does he want the audience to be freaked out by him? Or to relate to him, while still feeling weirded out by the turns the film takes?

Well, it explains why the film was a box office disappointment.

Yes, and Hitch saw it as a failure because of that. So I don't think his intention was to alienate people.

Most directors make a film which departs quite a bit from what they have been doing.

Saw "Make way for Tomorrow" (McCarey) yesterday and you can see the comedic touch that he displayed in "Duck Soup" which ultimately served other, more tragic, ends and ended up bombing at the box office.

I think this is where auteur theory can really fail as often directors aren't in control, is how I break it down

Oh they often aren't but I think Hitchcock absolutely was throughout the 50's.

Amusing to imagine Hitchcock crafting *that* ending and thinking he had a box office success on his hands.

Yeah I mean, it's hard to say his intention wasn't to alienate people when he a.) abruptly shifts the POV from Scottie to Judy in the last section, and b.) makes Scottie more and more unlikable and crazy right up to the end. Basically daring audiences to follow along. Which was part of his bag of tricks anyway, confounding expectations — but maybe in Vertigo he went farther than the audiences were willing to.

Yeah what I doubt a bit is that Hitchcock viewed the "unlikable and crazy" behaviour of Stewart's character through the same lens we do now; I think he probably thought this dare was less of an ask than we think.

Anyway apparently his own reasoning for why it failed commercially was that Stewart was too old, which, that's a factor but hardly in anyone's top5 haha.