Review – Vertigo

This movie was a lot creepier than I thought it was going to be. Jimmy Stewart stars as a detective with a fear of heights, a phobia that supplies the cinematographers with plenty of excuses to play around with their zoom lenses. Enter Kim Novak as the apparently-disturbed wife of an old school chum. Just at the two seem to be getting an affair underway, she commits suicide by jumping from a bell tower. Or did she? While wandering the streets, our distraught hero sees a woman who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Novak. The encounter drives him to a perverse desire to force the woman to dress, look and act exactly like his lost love. The twists and turns – particularly toward the end – left me wondering if Hitchcock was parodying or celebrating his own fetishistic obsession with bottle blondes. After all, one can scarcely help but notice that the grey outfit Stewart forces Novak to wear shows up again five years later on Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Overall this is one of the better entries in the list of movies that leave you with an icky feeling. Mildly amusing