Thrillers can be clas­si­fied into many cat­e­gories. One such is psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller and Hitch­cock is the mas­ter in such types of thrillers. His basic idea of film mak­ing is to engage the audi­ence right from the first frame — they note too many details in a frame and at last, they fail to pre­dict the next scene. That’s the power of Hitch­cock. He is an illu­sion­ist on screen.

The Hitch­cock movies broke all my myth beliefs about the Eng­lish as well as old time movies. They were as fresh as any new movie and the basic ele­ment is to engage the audi­ence in at least one form. At first, I tried “Rear win­dow” — not a great thriller but gave a nice idea about the mas­ter film maker. I started col­lect­ing his series and I enjoyed this movie thor­oughly. “VERTIGO” — What you see is not what you observe!

Plot

Scot­tie retires from the police depart­ment, real­iz­ing he has the prob­lem of ver­tigo [ fear of heights ]. One day, his old friend calls him and engages him as a pri­vate detec­tive to fol­low his wife. He sus­pects her behav­iors very strange [ sprit influ­ence ] and Scot­tie agrees. He fol­lows Gavin’s wife with­out much inter­est in the case. How can Hitch­cock be not inter­est­ing ??!! Scot­tie sees some dan­ger­ous behav­ior of Madeleine and saves her. Appar­ently, they develop a rela­tion and Scot­tie gets more con­fu­sion about the mys­te­ri­ous behav­ior of Made­line [ we too ! ].

Then things change unex­pect­edly and the story takes us towards the impos­si­ble directions.

View

The strength of Hitch­cock is he engages the audi­ence directly into the movie along with the char­ac­ters.  He keeps the audi­ence busy in watch­ing the titles, fol­low­ing the char­ac­ters, expect­ing some­thing to hap­pen. They even watch for his cameo appear­ance [ like Hitch­cock comes in one of the scenes in his films ]. Like in Tamil films, one can­not go out for a fag and come back in 5 min­utes. Once some­one told about the screen­play as if a scene is removed from the film, the film shouldn’t be felt com­pletely. That’s the way most of Hitchcock’s movies are made. He selects a short story/play/novel, engages other specialist(s) to rewrite the same for screen,  along with his super­vi­sion and finally directs with his mas­ter touch. The out­come is just magic !

I was shocked to see the movie made in 1958 [depict­ing 50s ] so fresh. It’s not only because of the restora­tion but the life and the char­ac­ters, the story have had. The Madeleine char­ac­ter is so mys­te­ri­ous which evokes too many ques­tions in the begin­ning. The cast­ing is fan­tas­tic. I can’t visu­al­ize other hero Cary Grant with some pho­bia but the slightly famine looked James Stew­art eas­ily fits in the role. About the hero­ines, Hitch­cock rarely repeats his hero­ines in his films. Of course, all of them are so beau­ti­ful. . Kim Novak is one who is mys­te­ri­ously beau­ti­ful in this movie — ultra cool blonde [ that too in the red robe with white dots :) ].

The music was done by Bernard Her­rmann and it was the per­fect match for a beau­ti­fully nar­rated thriller. Watch out the tower in the church — believe it !! it’s a set made for the movie. The places where Ver­tigo was shot, later turned as tourist spots [ Gunaa caves maadiri — I went in :) ]. There’s a dream sequence [ halu­ci­na­tions, may be ]also that comes in which inter­prets Scottie’s mind — it’s way ahead of its times. This film has some unan­swered ques­tions too — but you for­get to ask as you think some­thing else immediately.

Ver­tigo shows the com­plete con­trol of a direc­tor and Hitch­cock shows his best. The beau­ti­ful char­ac­ters, exotic visu­als, the unex­pected flow of the film.  The movie is 51 years old — I can’t believe it.

The other good movies from the shelf of [ mine :) ] Alfred Hitch­cock are

- Psy­cho
– North by north­west
- Strangers on a train
– Frenzy
– Spell­bound
– The Birds

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