Vertigo (PG)
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Caution: spoilers.

This Alfred Hitchcock film came out in 1958 (seventeen years before I was born). I finally saw it in 2018. Actually, it took me two nights to watch it. I watched most of it on a Tuesday, on my laptop. But the laptop was in kind of poor condition, and got tired easily, so it started slowing down before the end of the movie. And I was tired, too, so I decided to finish it the next day. And then didn't get around to finishing it until Saturday evening. Anyway... I want to say that before I watched it, I had it listed under film noir movies I wanted to see, because Wikipedia called it film noir. By the point at which I stopped watching it Tuesday night, I didn't really feel like it was what I'd call film noir, so I thought I'd just put my review under "classics." However, when I watched the rest of it, I changed my mind. The plot took some turns that definitely seemed more noirish. They also drastically reduced my appreciation of the film. At no point was it something I would have said I loved, but I guess it was interesting enough. By the end, though, I kind of hated it. So... my rating of one smiley is sort of an average of how I felt about it on Tuesday night and how I felt about it on Saturday night. And it's definitely not something I feel the need to ever watch again.

Anyway, James Stewart plays a recently retired San Francisco police detective named John "Scottie" Ferguson. Actually, the first scene was before his retirement. He and another cop were chasing a criminal over some rooftops, but Scottie misses a jump, and is hanging on over a long drop. The other cop tries to save him, but ends up falling to his death. Scottie himself survives, and it's that incident that led to his retirement. It seems he had acrophobia, which induced vertigo, a fact about himself he'd just discovered during that incident. Now that he's retired, he doesn't know what to do with his time, though he seems to spend a lot of it hanging out with his friend Midge. (She's played by Barbara Bel Geddes, best known to me as Miss Ellie from Dallas. So it was kind of neat to see her somewhat younger, here.) Apparently, Midge is in love with Scottie, though neither of them really seem to take that seriously. (It seemed to me like they both treated it as a sort of joke, so I suppose Scottie could be forgiven for failing to realize she really was in love with him.)

Then, Scottie gets a call from an old school acquaintance, Gavin Elster, who wants to hire him to follow his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak). He spins this story about Madeleine supposedly being possessed, or something. Of course Scottie doesn't buy that, but he gets roped into tailing her, anyway. And he learns of a connection between Madeleine and a long-dead woman named Carlotta Valdes. When he reports on this to Elster, the latter tells him that he already knew about the connection, but that his wife doesn't. Scottie also learns more about Carlotta from a historian that he gets Midge to introduce him to. And eventually he saves Madeleine's life, when she jumps into the bay (apparently driven by the spirit of Carlotta to commit suicide). One thing I really don't like about the movie is the next scene, when Madeleine wakes up (sans clothes) in Scottie's apartment, with little or no recollection of the events that led him to bring her there. I couldn't help but look at it from her perspective, in which he must surely seem awfully creepy. And while she does eventually leave, she comes back the next day, and they begin a romantic relationship (with no mention of the fact that she's still married to Elster, let alone guilt over the affair). And before long, the two of them are madly in love, for no reason I could see. Just one of those things viewers have to accept for the sake of the plot.

Eventually, Madeleine commits suicide by jumping from a rooftop, and Scottie is unable to stop her, because his vertigo prevents him from following her all the way up the winding stairs. After that, Scottie is put on trial, which we only see the end of, when he's declared not culpable for her death. Soon after that, he has a mental breakdown. Then the movie jumps forward to after he's recovered... and that's about where my computer stopped working. When I resumed the movie four nights later... things started getting weirder. (If this movie hadn't been made in the 50s, but more recently, I very well might have put my review under "weird movies.") Scottie goes around to various places he'd originally followed Madeleine, before they actually met. And then he meets a woman named Judy Barton (also played by Novak). She reminds him of Madeleine, though to be honest I didn't really see the resemblance. (Maybe that was because of the four days since I had last seen her, but also partly because she did look somewhat different... even if it was mostly her hair color.) I did like that Judy was initially wary of him, a strange man showing up at her door and acting, well, strange. But soon she agrees to go to dinner with him. Beyond that, I won't spoil any major plot developments. I'll just say that mostly what I hated about the movie was the way Scottie acted, as his relationship with Judy progressed. I suppose I could look at it as a commentary on the way a lot of men treat women in real life, and try to appreciate the movie on that level. But I can't. For one thing, it's all terribly complicated, for reasons I can't explain without spoiling the story. But also, it just feels like that kind of social commentary is mostly separate from the tone of the rest of the movie, like it's shoehorned in, or something. (Also, because of the plot complications, it would bear very little resemblance to the circumstances of men acting that shitty in real life, which would kind of defeat the purpose, if social commentary really was the purpose.) Or... maybe it just doesn't work for me because the totally fucked up obsession is also totally reciprocal (despite an obvious power imbalance in Scottie's favor). Oh... and (on a less important note) just like in Rear Window, it kind of nagged at me that Stewart's love interest was more than twenty years younger than he.

So, I dunno. I'm glad to have seen the movie. But I'm disappointed that I couldn't like it a lot more than I did. Particularly considering it is a classic, which many people who know a lot more about film than I do find incredibly brilliant, in various ways. But... hey, art is subjective.