VERTIGO

"Come here!" "No, you'll muss me"--romantic banter in VERTIGO

Saw Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO for the third time, with Matthew's Movie Meetup group at the Yonge & Dundas Event Screen.  There was some confusion about when to meet so I ended up getting there an hour early and waiting in the lobby. (Oh well, I got some more of WHAT A YEAR! read and had something more to blog about.)

VERTIGO is one of those movies that improves with repeat viewings.  Indeed, you have to see it two or three times to appreciate it. (I can well believe that its initial reviews were not so good.) It's the one where detective James Stewart gets hired to put a tail on Kim Novak, who says she's possessed by the spirit of a girl who died a century before, but all is not what it seems...

It's a disquieting portrait of romantic obsession. Many people consider VERTIGO Hitchcock's masterpiece. (Myself, I'd choose NOTORIOUS.) Stewart and Novak have an eerie chemistry, helped greatly by Bernard Herrmann's haunting music and the San Francisco locations.  Has any movie made better use of that city?  I ought to see BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE, a romantic comedy with Novak as a witch out to put a spell on Stewart, not unlike in this movie.

In 1976 Brian de Palma, working from a Paul Schrader script, directed a curious reworking of VERTIGO unsubtly titled OBSESSION.  That one had Cliff Robertson as a New Orleans businessmen whose wife (Genevieve Bujold) and daughter get kidnapped, then drown in the Mississippi River where their bodies are never found.  Twenty years later he meets a young woman the same age as his daughter would have been, also played by Genevieve Bujold...