What is his plan? He gets Kim Novak, a woman half his age, to dress like his wife. He has her pretend that she has a fixation with his wife's tragic great-grandmother. He reads in the paper that an old chum, Jimmy Stewart, has quit the police force due to vertigo. Stewart is hired to follow Novak around, a task he promptly relishes.
Novak takes Stewart to a California mission, which Stewart is surprisingly quick to identify after she gives a brief verbal description of it. She races up the stairs of the bell tower, correctly supposing that Stewart cannot follow due to his vertigo.
At the top of the tower, the husband is there with the real wife, whom he has killed. He is there with the corpse waiting for Novak to make it up the stairs. The husband throws the body off the tower, then hides with Novak before leaving the mission when the commotion is over.
This far-fetched plot depends upon the wife usually out of town. Another problem is that the lovely wife's dramatic 'suicide' would put her photo in the newspaper and on television, which Stewart would surely see and identify as someone else.
As a mystery, Vertigo doesn't work. But it is also a romance, and in this genre it finds redemption. A slowly paced drama, there are many shoots of the lovely, poised Novak behaving as if in a trance, while Stewart gapes at her with considerable admiration. When he finds her again after a long absence, he is determined to remodel her exactly as she was when he first saw her, an obsession she obliges all too readily. In fact, Novak spends the film doing exactly as her much older lovers instruct.
The sets are beautiful. The roof tops, the cemetery, the San Francisco Bay, the art museum, the restaurants, and the mission all radiant elegance and tranquility. But beneath it all is a pathos that Stewart and Novak share, as if they are determined to ruin their lives without even understanding why.
Vertigo is fascinating for its insight into obsession. Still, the plot has too many holes for the film to achieve greatness. In the initial scene, Stewart is hanging for dear life from a gutter. How does he possibly get down from there alive? Stewart has a dream involving his disembodied head, which puts him into a catatonic state. A doctor tells it could be a year before he recovers. The next scene, he's back on the street. Novak jumps to her death from the tower, but why? Hasn't she ever seen a nun before?
Vertigo is a perfect title for the film because my head spins when I try to understand it. But perhaps Hitchcock really intended it as a comedy. In this light, the dream sequence is indeed hilarious.
Hitchcock made many of his best films during the fifties. Strangers on a Train and Rear Window are outstanding, and The Wrong Man, North by Northwest, and I Confess are also very good. He may be the best film director of all time, although John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, and Howard Hawks must also be considered. Vertigo is not among Hitchcock's best, but it is nonetheless entertaining and often compelling.