Mubi Monday: Vertigo (1958)

When I first saw it, many years ago, The Birds used to be my favourite Alfred Hitchcock movie. I have since changed my mind on that film. Despite the superb set-pieces, there are some other aspects to it that make it a surprisingly weak feature from the master of suspense. And so I moved my love to Psycho. And then Rear Window. Oh, and North By Northwest. The point I am trying to make is that ol' Hitch has a number of contenders that could easily be viewed as his very best. Vertigo should always be in the running.

James Stewart plays a detective, John Ferguson AKA Scottie, who is hired by an old acquaintance to follow his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak). There's a building sense that Madeleine is going to do herself some harm, a notion that solidifies into a reality when Madeleine tries to jump into a bay and drown herself. This is only a temporary reprieve, and Vertigo really kicks into gear after the halfway point, which sees Scottie encountering a woman named Judy Barton (Novak), a woman who seems very much like Madeleine in many ways.

It's always easy to admire the works of Hitchcock while also unfairly dismissing them as nothing more than exercises in thrills and tension, yet so many of his movies have a lot more to them than that. It just so happens that it's usually easier to recommend his films without having to go into too much detail. The real exploration and discussion of his classics is left to people who want to write essays, or even whole books, on them. If you think I am going to try and change that with this brief review then you can think again.

What I will do, however, is try to emphasise just why this is one of the greatest films of all time. Because it most certainly is.

Things have a good grounding in the script, by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor. Although it's structured in a way that makes some of the 128-minute runtime feel like padding, very few scenes fail to provide food for thought, either in terms of the plotting, the characterisations, or the psychological turbulence of the leads.

Then you have a cast all doing excellent work. Stewart gives another wonderful performance for a director he worked well with, moving from his likeable everyman persona into something darker as the film whirls and dives into ever-darkening waters. Novak gives two performances that are almost flawless, particularly as things develop in the second half of the movie and viewers start to wonder if Judy IS Madeleine, or just someone who looks very much like her. The third main player here is Barbara Bel Geddes as Marjorie Wood AKA Midge, a close friend to Stewart's character, and someone who has similar difficulties to him in processing some complex feelings that she at least manages to manage in a slightly more healthy manner (at least outwardly anyway). There are others (Tom Helmore as the husband of Madeleine, a number of very small roles for characters populating the world that these characters move through, but the focus stays tight on the central pair, for the most part).

Add the masterful direction to this and you have quite the heady brew. Hitchcock isn't afraid to show the psychological cracks deepening and affecting the environments around his leads, and he also manages to show the effects of vertigo with a dolly zoom effect, still used best in both this film and Jaws. Love, obsession, control, regret, madness, all of these things and more are explored in Vertigo, in a flowing and beautiful series of scenes, accompanied by yet another one of the best music scores from Bernard Herrmann.

Watch it, take it all in, watch it again, take more in, and be sure to have it to hand whenever you want to enjoy an absolute classic.

10/10

This is the set to get. It is stunning.

Prime Time: Panic In The Streets (1950)

When I dive deep into the muddy waters of noir, as I do almost every November nowadays, it is with two main aims. First of all, I love to discover the little gems that I'd never heard of before (which is a lot easier to do with the many noirs that were churned out cheaply enough back in their heyday). Second, I like to catch up on the titles I know by reputation, but have somehow not yet seen. Panic In The Streets was one of the latter titles. Part of me thinks that I may well have seen it many years ago, before I had the advantage of various internet sites and apps to help me keep track, but my memory was coming up with nothing when I read the title and synopsis, so I figured it would be worth my time. And it certainly was.

The plot is quite simple. A man is killed by some criminal types, but officials are put on red alert when it is discovered that the man had a terminal case of pneumonic plague. The important thing is to find anyone who has been infected by the man, and that's what Lt. Cmdr. Clinton Reed M. D. (Richard Widmark) and Capt. Tom Warren (Paul Douglas) set out to do. Unfortunately, that's not an easy task when they are dealing with a network of criminals used to avoiding the authorities whenever possible.

Directed by Elia Kazan, with the final screenplay credit given to Richard Murphy, from the numerous people listed (and unlisted), Panic In The Streets is a nice little race-against-time thriller with a decent smattering of main characters helping to distract from the unbalanced tone. Why is it unbalanced? Well, others may disagree, but it feels a bit too cosy to me, plays things a bit too safe when it could have simply continued to ratchet up the tension all the way to almost unbearable levels. I understand that the film was released in different times, yet it still feels a bit lighter than it needed to be. One or two more victims would have helped, although that may have possibly affected the plot too much, with more bodies meaning all hope of containing the outbreak lost.

Widmark and Douglas work well together, one being a smart man becoming increasingly desperate and tired, the other being someone non-plussed by the situation until it starts to become more and more tangible around him, at which point he fully steps up to do whatever needs done. And Barbara Bel Geddes does well to make a good impression in the rather thankless role of Nancy Reed aka the good little lady waiting to look after her husband when he comes home from his tough job. But film fans will have more fun with the crooks here. One minor criminal is played by Zero Mostel, more famous for his lighter roles, and the main villain of the piece is played by Jack Palance, billed here as Walter Jack Palance. Palance is as tough and intimidating as he would be in many other roles, and does well at showing the vicious nature of his character as he is put on the defensive while feeling the law closing in around him.

The polar opposites of Widmark and Palance make this work, with Douglas and Mostel both proving themselves superb supporting cast members, and this remains an enjoyable and strange little thriller, classed as a film noir (although that is more down to the central idea and characters being focused on than any other main noir tropes you can think of). It's not an unmissable classic, but I'm certainly not disappointed that I prioritised it as a viewing this week.

7/10

There's a disc here.
Americans can buy this copy.