YMMV / Vertigo

• Adaptation Displacement: Based on an obscure French novel, D'entre les morts (The Living and the Dead^note The title literally translates as "From Among the Dead", which also was the movie's working title), by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Like most books adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, it's long since been overshadowed by the movie. ^note Incidentally, Boileau-Narcejac were the authors of the source for the French classic Les Diaboliques by Henri-Georges Clouzot (promoted to his and Hitchcock's mutual chagrin, as "The French Hitchcock"), a film that Hitchcock liked, and that it's likely that the latter's success inspired him to check out their catalogue
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The film doesn't really try to explain the motivations of Scottie and Judy, leaving it up to the viewer to determine why they do the things they do. As a result, everyone who sees it seems to come away with a slightly different take on them as characters. Even Midge has become a popular subject of discussion, as a reflection of Scottie and his attitudes toward women.
  • Judy herself gets this with a full novel dedicated to telling her side of the story called The Testament of Judith Barton by Wendy Powers and Robin McLeod, including that she wasn't really Gavin's mistress. Keep in mind, the following may be construed as non-canon to the film, despite the writer's basing the scenes from the film on the script: The story shows a bit of Judy's background in her hometown of Salina, Kansas. She meets Gavin through her job at a small-time jeweler some time after her move to San Francisco (as she learned to repair jewelry from her father's business) when he was getting some of Madeleine's jewelry appraised. During the day she would work at the jewelry store while at night, she would be taking Method acting classes (having done several plays at school). But the owner has a stroke, which results in the jewelry store being closed down, leaving Judy desperate for work and wanting some money to start her own jewelry store. Gavin pitched to her the idea of helping him because she looked a lot like Madeleine and told her a story that Madeleine was being stalked by someone, and that he needed to know this stalker's motives (if he was dangerous or not). After Gavin had Judy made over, he set her up at the McKittrick Hotel, knowing that Scottie would follow Judy there (and we finally get an explanation behind the iconic Fride Logic: Judy informed the manager that she was being followed and asked her for her help by not only telling her about a fire escape on the back side of the building, but to stall Scottie by lying to him). Her dive into San Francisco Bay is revealed to be due to her attempting to recover a bracelet that was important to her by trying to jump on a nearby boulder and falling into the water (to which she nearly drown due to the skirt of her dress). After getting to know Scottie and getting information from him about Gavin, she begins to realize that Gavin was lying to her and playing both Scottie and her against each other. When she attempted to run up the bell tower, she had intended to warn the real Madeleine of the truth. But as she got up into the belfry, she saw that she was too late and Gavin tossed Madeleine's body off as he had planned. As a result of her actions of playing Madeleine, Gavin was able to convince her to keep quiet by saying that if she had gone to the police, he would claim that she was his mistress and that the murder was her idea. And when Scottie turns back up in her life, despite her trying to break his obsession with the image of Madeleine she created for him, she is unable to do so, even up to the end.
  • Gavin Elster consoling Scottie after the inquest, and telling him he is not to blame. Does Elster do this because he feels some measure of guilt for how much damage his murderous plan did to Scottie, especially after the latter is raked over the coals by the coroner? Or is he just putting on a gracious facade to nip any potential suspicions in the bud, given that Scottie is a detective?
  • The ending is something that is debated due to it occurring off screen. Did Judy accidentally fall to her death or did she jump out of fear?
• Award Snub:
  • Entertainment Weekly considers the failure to even nominate Jimmy Stewart for his performance as Scottie to be the worst Oscar snub ever. Many tend to agree, although they would add that there are many others which are comparable. Of course, Vertigo, and Hitchcock's films of the '50s in general for that matter, were not seen as Oscar Bait in their day and Stewart likely never had a chance.
  • The film received two Academy Award nominations for Art Direction and Sound. It wasn't nominated for Best Picture, Director or Score.
• Delusion Conclusion: There's a few people who interpret the entire film to be a Dying Dream for Scottie as he dangles from the edge of the building in the opening. Alternately, some viewers think everything that happens after Midge leaves Scottie in the hospital is in Scottie's mind. This makes Judy merely a fantasy he constructs to get Madeleine back and assuage his guilt over her death.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Plenty of fans self-identify as being on Team Midge.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The original 1958 poster calling it "Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece" was maybe viewed as a rather ambitious bit of exaggerated hype at the time. Today, lots of people wholeheartedly agree with that statement.
• Hype Backlash: It's finally achieved the critical and cultural prestige and popularity to face this. Especially after the film unexpectedly dethroned Citizen Kane in the 2012 Sight and Sound Critics' Best Films poll^note Many of the critics and directors polled more or less admitted they voted to knock Citizen Kane of the perch, i.e, they had Hype Aversion for Welles and now wanted to pass the disease to a new carrier. Incidentally, the Director's 2012 Poll chose Tokyo Story by Yasujiro Ozu, so it's not an unanimous choice It was a modest success (an Acclaimed Flop by fifties standards) in its time, and critically mixed, and more or less vanished off American screens for decades. It's only since The '90s, that it enjoyed the critical reputation it now has. While the general consensus nowadays is that Vertigo should definitely be counted among Hitchcock's best works, you will find plenty of professional critics or even casual moviegoers feeling that it got way more praise than it deserved and much of the original 1958 criticism of it was in fact well founded. Possibly one of the most convincing arguments is that the film isn't innovative on a technical level (with the notable exception of the appropriately named cinematographic gimmick known as the Vertigo Effect). It's pointed out that from the aesthetic-technological view, a Hollywood without Vertigo wouldn't differ a great deal from the Hollywood we know today, as compared to Citizen Kane or Star Wars. Among Hitchcock's enthusiasts, Psycho, Rear Window or Rope, for example, are considered more influential and well-executed movies.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Madeleine was killed by her husband, Gavin who hired Judy Barton to impersonate her and make Madeleine's death look like a suicide.
  • Judy dies the same way Madeleine does.
• Magnificent Bastard: Gavin Elster is a soft-spoken but devious friend of Scottie Ferguson, whom he uses as a pawn in a plot to murder his wife Madeleine for her money. Hiring Scottie to follow Madeleine, Elster has his accomplice Judy pose as her, planting clues to make Scottie think she's being influenced by a vengeful spirit. Exploiting Scottie's fear of heights as part of his plan, Elster kills his real wife and stages the scene as a suicide. With the inquest concluding that Madeleine's death was an accident, Elster is cleared of all suspicion and even defends Scottie from the coroner's accusations, before disappearing and escaping all consequences for his crimes, remembered as one of cinema's most effective and successful villains.
• Narm:
  • Near the start, Scottie's on-the-nose line to Midge "we were engaged once" comes across as very heavy handed and said purely to tell the audience their relationship.
  • The mental breakdown in the middle of the film can come off like a badly done Disney Acid Sequence.
  • The final scene with Judy falling to her death off the belltower upon being startled by a curious nun could probably provoke a chuckle or two instead of an appriopriate sense of tragedy. It doesn't help that the aforementioned nun's reaction makes it look like she witnesses this kind of thing every Tuesday.
• Narm Charm:
  • The plot relies on obvious contrivances and centers on an almost hilariously convoluted murder scheme. Even people who love the film have called its plot "preposterous". But the direction and acting is so good, it doesn't matter.
  • The Driving a Desk process shots when Scottie drives Judy back to the mission at the climax mistakenly have the car on the wrong side of the road for part of the scene. But it actually works, because Scottie has become so unhinged at that point that it makes sense that he'd be Driving Like Crazy.
  • "You were a very apt pupil too, weren't you? You were a very apt pupil!" A line that sounds odd when it's spoken, but Stewart's delivery makes it work.
• Older Than They Think: A thriller with Film Noir elements (although it's in Technicolor), set in an iconic, photogenic location, where a mentally unstable man has an obsessive relationship with a younger blonde woman. Infidelity, a murder plot, a character who ends up Faking the Dead and a tall bell tower also figure into the story. That would be 1953's Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe. There's been some speculation over whether it had any influence on Hitchcock. For bonus points, it co-starred frequent Hitchcock leading man Joseph Cotten.
• Poor Man's Substitute: Kim Novak for Grace Kelly as the classic Hitchockian blonde.
• She Really Can Act: Doubled with Vindicated by History. At the time of the release (and throughout her acting career), Kim Novak's acting abilities were largely dismissed by the audience and critics alike - and Vertigo initially did little to change that. However, with a newly found appreciation for the film itself there gradually came recognition that it would have lost a great deal of its magic, had it not been for the actress who portrayed the female lead. Novak's trademark vulnerability seems tailor-made for this film, with her performance in the second half especially moving and powerful. She manages to get the audience to sympathize and identify with a character who would otherwise be considered a Femme Fatale villain.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: One of complaints about the movie is that The Reveal of the Plot Twist, a good 40 minutes before the ending, ruined the potential for a more shocking finale. This was more or less an Intended Audience Reaction on Hitchcock's part (The Novel he adapted from indeed did have such a twist, but Hitchcock and his screenwriters changed it), since he wanted a Halfway Plot Switch that converted a Psychological Thriller into a character study about The Hero's sexual obsession and neurosis, and part of the way of achieving that was via Perspective Flip of seeing the hero from Judy's point of view.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The disturbing scenes where Scottie forces Judy to get the same grey suit that Madeleine wore. He bullies her verbally into doing it (as well as having her hair dyed), but the employees in the boutique and hair salon go along with it without question due to the patriarchal moral standards of the time. While the film portrays his actions as disturbing, it's odd to modern audiences for bystanders to not have the same reaction.
  • The hotel clerk blithely notes that "Carlotta Valdes" is a pretty name in spite of being "foreign", a reflection of how Anglo-dominated San Francisco was in The '50s (the population was 75% white at that point, compared to less than 50% now), and definitely not a comment you'd hear today. It's also pretty ironic given that the Valdes family traces its lineage to Mexican California, before it was annexed by the US.
• Vindicated by History: Neither a box office hit (though it recouped costs) nor critically acclaimed (except by Hitchcock's admirers in France and some yet-to-be-famous-or-influential cinephiles like a young Martin Scorsese) when it was originally released, it is now regarded as one of Hitchcock's best and most popular films, and by many film-makers and critics as his masterpiece, alongside other essentials made in a 9 year stretch - Rear Window, North By Northwest, Psycho, The Birds.
• The Woobie:
  • Madeleine Elster, actually Judy Barton. Hands down, one of the most tragic characters in the Hitchcock-verse. Her father had died and her mother remarried to a man she had an antagonistic relationship with prompted her to San Francisco. Unfortunately, Gavin Elster discovers her and uses her in his scheme to kill his wife, she constantly has to think about killing herself, Scottie — the closest person she has to a companion — doesn't love her for who she is and tries to recreate "Madeleine" when she finds her true nature, and pretty much feels useless at this point. And all this happens before she gets scared by a nun and dies for real. Remind us again who the real protagonist is?
  • And of course, the real Madeleine.
  • Midge as well, considering she struggles with unrequited love for Scottie (it's said they were previously engaged) and she has to watch him become completely obsessed with another woman. She eventually realises there's no place for her in his life and has to leave. She gets reunited with him in the alternate ending, which could be seen as Throw the Dog a Bone.
• Viewer Name Confusion: Since the character names aren't listed in the credits, there's some confusion about the spelling of the two leads. According to the screenplay, it's Scottie and Madeleine.

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