Vertigo? No

A couple of weeks ago in my post about Groundhog Day I said this when commenting on Stanley Fish's list of the ten best movies:

Vertigo is also a fine movie but Hitchcock probably did a dozen things better. Off the top of my head I think of The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, Rebecca, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, and North By Northwest as being superior to Vertigo.

Little did I know at the time how out-of-step I was with the accepted opinion of "Vertigo." I realized this earlier this week when the new issue of Commentary hit the news stands and I read Terry Teachout's column, which this month deals with Hitchcock's films. You need a subscription to read the whole thing but the abstract gives you the information needed for the subject of this post:

In November of last year, Cahiers du Cinéma, the influential French film magazine, asked 78 French-speaking critics and scholars to choose the greatest film directors of all time. Alfred Hitchcock received the second-highest number of votes, just behind Jean Renoir but ahead of Fritz Lang, Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, F.W. Murnau, and Howard Hawks. The same group gave Hitchcock’s Vertigo the number-eight spot on a list of the 100 best films.1 No eyebrows were raised by the inclusion of a director of thrillers on so stellar a list of what the French refer to as cinéastes. Nor is anyone known to have expressed surprise in 2002 when Sight & Sound, the British film magazine, published the results of the latest in a series of top-10 polls that it has been conducting at decade-long intervals since 1952. On that occasion, an international panel of film critics ranked Vertigo at #2 on their list of great films, just behind Citizen Kane, while a similar group of film directors placed it at #6.

Then, a little later in the day I made my way over to James Lileks site (a daily stop because I love to laugh and Lileks makes me laugh, sometimes so hard I have to close the door to my office so no one will pass by and see me laughing like a hyena) and he too took up the subject of Vertigo:

I’m not one of those who thinks “Vertigo” is Hitchcock’s masterpiece, just because it’s “personal” and “tormented” - it’s almost a dishonest movie, and it can’t even manage to be the supernatural thriller it pretends it’s going to be. But the music just pulls your heart out. Loss and longing and emptiness - and when it’s used for the most emotional moment of the entire movie, which also happens to be the most unsettlingly sad and perverse, it turns into fulfillment and completness without changing a note.

Anyhow, I was truly surprised to find that Vertigo is widely considered to be Hitch's finest movie - I really had no idea. Who'd of guessed? The movie is good but to me it is only above average Hitch - better than most but not in the elite, as I mentioned above. The quote above shows Lileks agrees with me and if you read Terry's column he does too, so I'm in some good company there. Terry thinks North By Northwest is Hitch's best, and Lileks likes Rear Window most of all, with a nod towards North By Northwest. I would add Notorious in there to round out his top three but I do have a liking for Hitch's earlier British films, especially The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. Throw in Strangers on a Train and on the strength of those six films alone Hitchcock deserves his stellar reputation. But not for Vertigo. I think it undeservedly high reputation is an example of how a group of pipe-smoking high-brows can anoint a work as "art" and the mass media nods and starts to put out the word (Raging Bull would fall into this category too). The intellectual elites doing the blessing probably felt that it was Hitchcock's finest work because of it's deadly seriousness: Lileks references its reputation as "tormented" and Terry mentions that "[Vertigo] has no comic aspect: it is one of [Hitchcock's] rare attempts to make a wholly tragic statement." Of course, the high-brows eat up anything that lacks humor: the love the serious and the tormented. To them, if Hitchcock wasn't being playful, as he often was in his other movies, then it must be a sign that he was aiming for high art in Vertigo. Therefore, Vertigo was his best.

To which I say: nonsense. The six movies I mentioned above are vastly more entertaining than Vertigo, and let's face it, while Hitchcock was a master craftsman, he was in the game to entertain, not to produce high art. It's as entertainment that his movies should be judged and on that basis, Vertigo falls short of much of his other work.