In praise of … Vertigo

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is at once a dark thriller, a Bergmanesque psychodrama, an essay in fractured perceptions, a technical tour de force – and a celebration of San Francisco. "If I could just find the key, the beginning, and put it all together," says James Stewart as infatuated Scottie Ferguson. "And just explain it away?" retorts Kim Novak's Madeleine. Maybe that's the key to Vertigo's appeal. Brilliantly constructed, it is nevertheless jarringly unresolved. To many, Hitchcock still means Psycho , North By Northwest and Rear Window , all with endings. But Vertigo's disjunctive star rises ever higher among cineastes. This week the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound survey voted it "the greatest film of all time ", ending Citizen Kane's 50-year reign. A watershed in taste, perhaps, with the external finally ceding to the personal, the public to the private, in art as in the world. But Vertigo is an indisputable masterpiece nonetheless.