Vertigo

Vertigo (1958 - Alfred Hitchcock)

It is difficult for me to understand the so called "greatness" of the film, Vertigo. Let me go through step-by-step why Vertigo is a bad movie:

1. The movie has the wrong tone. The story is extremely dark, but the movie does not have a dark tone to it. All elements of this film (music, lighting, cinematography, etc) are played out as either a thriller or an epic romance, and Vertigo is really neither of those things...it's a dark drama with a mystery plot twist.

2. The characters are unlikable. Scotty falls in love with 'Madeleine', who he thinks is married to his friend - yet he doesn't seem to have any guilt or remorse about it. Then he meets Judy, who he thinks is a different person, and he basically wants to turn her into 'Madeliene'. That is quite obsessive and unhealthy, to a point where I don't think the audience should be sympathizing with his character. On the other hand we have Judy. She collaberated with Gavin to kill the real Madeleine. And the only regret she seems to have is losing Scotty - not the fact that she helped murder a person. So the two characters in this movie that we are supposed to sympathize with are both unlikable characters with no redeeming value. It seems that the movie is trying to give them redeeming value by them being in love with each other - which not only is bad logic, but doesn't work anyway.

3. The romance is unromantic and unrealistic. Watching the first part of the movie, it appears to be a mystery. The movie directs the viewer to be thinking about this mystery involving Madeleine being taken over by the ghost of Colette. So the romance that develops between Scotty and 'Madeleine' is secondary. Additionally, this romance dies to the viewer after 'Madeleine' is thrown off the tower. It only lives in Scotty, which seems strange and obsessive, as is explained above. We don't really see any romance that happens between Scotty and Judy, all we see are his obsessions of him wanting her to look like Madeleine. So this romance never really takes hold of the film - in the first part it is secondary to the plot and in the second part it is an obsession and not a romance.

4. Bad storytelling - poor development of plot & characters. If Vertigo is to be used in any film courses, it should be used as an example of inefficient story telling. This movie drags on for over 2 hours, yet the characters and plot are under-developed. Look at the scenes where Scotty is following 'Madeleine' - there are many unneeded and lengthy shots to portray a few pieces of information. We don't need to see the cars driving and parking to and from every place; we don't need to see a bunch of facial expressions on Scotty's face; we don't need a couple of minutes at every scene. It was just so long, and there are 2 or 3 sequences like that! As a viewer, we gained some information to the plot and that's about it. Then when Scotty gets out of the mental ward, he goes to every one of these same places and mistakenly sees 'Madeleine' like 3 or 4 times! I mean that whole sequence wasn't even needed considering that Scotty's friend verbally said that he was still in love with 'Madeleine' when she was leaving the mental ward. It's just so redundant without any point of being redundant other than to hit us over the head with simple information such as "He is following her" or "He's still in love with Madeleine".

5. The music is horrible. I hate the music, although I will admit many classic films have bad scores in my opinion. But even if you like the music, some of it completely doesn't fit. It has overly dramatic, sweeping epic romance music for scenes between Scotty & Madeleine/Judy. That is totally uncalled for in this movie where the romance is very unlike the sweeping epic romances like in Gone With the Wind. It's not even a romance, like I explained above. I mean, are we really supposed to buy into the idea that Scotty and Judy are in love after he makes her dress up exactly like 'Madeleine'? It is ridiculous.

6. Poor motivation/closure for the end scene. At the end of the movie, Judy jumps off the tower. I could understand it if she jumped because she can't live with herself for being responsible for someone's death and never being able to gain the love of Scotty. But she doesn't jump for these reasons, at least the movie didn't portray it that way in my opinion. She seemingly jumps out of fear from someone walking up the stairs. The person walking up turned out to be a nun, which has nothing to do with the movie. Additionally, there really wasn't anybody that should have evoked such fear in Judy - the only person she could have been fearful of was Scotty, who was right there, obviously not about to kill her. And how does jumping and killing yourself help anything...if anyone was going to kill her up there, it would have likely been by pushing her off the tower. It is just so mind boggingly stupid that she jumped off that tower! But the ending alone wasn't bad, the entire movie was bad.

Vertigo - 2 out of 10