four_star_diva

Could almost be a precursor to Antonioni's Blow Up" as this film deals with a character circumstantially caught up in a brutal murder, whose bouts of uncontrolled anger and depression make him immediately suspect because he was the last person to see the girl alive. However, the film rather than zoning in on the crime, the victim, the investigation revolves around an unlikely budding relationship between a good Samaritan `guardian angel' who appears in the nick of time to alibi Bogart's character and may stay on to rehabilitate him, but then maybe not ...

This film gives us that rare view of the sometimes unglamorous business of making films and the individual tolls taken on some by the process. `Sunset Boulevard,' `The Player,' and `The Bad and the Beautiful' are three others among many excellent films on the subject.

Nicholas Ray remains one of films least revered Directors, yet he gave us some of the greatest, including `Rebel Without a Cause.'

So many of Hitch's films deal with physical vertigo - high, revolving camera shots, monumental manmade structures from which so many erstwhile Hitchcock characters periliously hang. However, in this one, not only does the hero struggle with his physical vertigo, but he becomes hopelessly mired in a mental verigo from which there is no reprieve. No hand will ever reach into that darkness to pull him to safety.

Scotty's inability to release Madeleine mirrors the obsessive madness of Mrs. Danvers as she stirs up the ghost of Rebecca. And like Mrs. Danvers, the obsession eventually tragically overtakes and consumes him.

Psycho may well be considered Hitch's best film, but Vertigo is certainly his most stylish and stylized.

Quite simply, at the very top of the film noir genre. Mitchum as the wise cracking PI who falls hard for femme fatale plus Jane Greer tries to live not to regret it.

Keep this film close at hand. It is one you can pop in the Video player or DVD and become transfixed and transported immediately.