I note that Vertigo has been voted the best film ever made.
It beat, somehow, Army Of Shadows, the Russian War And Peace, The City Of Life And Death, Rashomon, Wild Strawberries, Armacord, In Which We Serve, The Tin Drum, The Lives Of Others, The Best Years Of Our Lives, Flags Of Our Fathers, The Hustler, Downfall, Danton, Daniel, The Road To Perdition, The Seven Samurai, The Seventh Seal, The Syrian Bride, Lebanon, The Hurt Locker, Jarhead, Jules Et Jim and my current favourite A Royal Affair, apparently. Can’t see how.
The trouble with Vertigo, Hitchcock’s most gorgeous-looking (each frame an Edward Hopper painting) and most lushly-orchestrated (Benny Herrmann’s yearning, remorseful, searching soundtrack still unsurpassed in cinema, and lately used, correctly, to climax The Artist), and the first thirty-seven weren’t all that good, Craig Lahiff having lately surpassed them all with Swerve) is that it’s a fraud.
It’s a fraud because the story makes no sense at all. If Kim Novak is, as she seems, twenty-eight and Scotty, Jimmy Stewart, is (as he seems) fifty, it makes no psychological sense. A man thus obsessed is usually an ageing homosexual keen on a fifteen-year-old boy or a Humbert Humbert stressed by a teenage girl. It is the story of Howard Hawks, fifty-one, and Lauren Bacall, eighteen; Peter Bogdanovitch and Cybill Shepherd; Minnelli and Judy Garland; Duigan and Nicole; Henry Higgins, in short, and Liza Doolittle. It is a Liza story, a Gigi story, a Lolita story, an Ashby story, and the girl has to be under twenty. You don’t dress up a thirty-year-old woman as your ideal dead love. You just don’t.
And this accounts for the old perverts of American criticism having chosen it as their best film — above, say, Pretty Baby, Malle’s film about a child prostitute learning the ropes, or Little Miss Sunshine perfecting her bump-and-grind at eight, or Gigi, or Daddy Long Legs, or Beautiful Kate.
It’s the love that dare not speak its name.
Hitchcock’s best film is North By North-west, a genial touristic thriller and cliffhanger which foreboded all the james Bond films and was, at its heart, a jest, like a Preston Sturges love comedy. A wacky thriller if you like. Vertigo, in territory like Nabokov’s Laughter In The Dark or Joyce Carol Oates’s A Fair Maiden, was Hitch’s most pretentious, most French film, and loved by the Cahiers De Cinema gang therefore. But it’s at its heart a paperback romance, really.
And they should hush their mouths.
Name:
My list in order (well, kind of
)
Rear Window
Dial M for Murder
North By North-West
Rope
Strangers On A Train
Notorious
39 Steps
To Catch a Thief
The Lady Vanishes
Vertigo
Rebecca
Sabotage
The Trouble with Harry
He married Candice Bergen, made My Dinner With Andre and Uncle Vanya On 42nd Street, and died.
As you do.
Add Spellbound and you have a good list. There are thirty-seven others that are barely any good at all.
I feel a certain repulsion when watching Hitchcock’s films, I think they are particularly ugly to look at. I am not aware if it was Alf’s preferred option, but the films seem to have a purposeful heightened sense of artificiality, as if he always wanted to make you aware that it was a film you were watching. The colours are acidic, like the pool room of Van Gogh, bile green and demonic reds. Even with those wonderful sleights of hand, those beautiful one shot camera ascents and descents via stairs and landings, through doorways and windows and back again, his films jarred with me because of the garish colouring, the melodramatic scores, the stilted dialogue always a beat or two behind what I always felt to be the natural rhythm of the film, and the non naturalistic acting, Jimmy Stewart not being Jimmy Stewart but being told to act like Jimmy Stewart.
I haven’t seen anywhere near half of them, I can’t recall seeing any in a cinema, and they seem too confined, boxed in and claustrophobic on TV, and perhaps it’s the TV that lends an extra ugliness to them like episodes of Perry Mason. I think my favourite was Spellbound, Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman and the strange Leo G. Carroll who I never trusted, even as the chief of UNCLE, the Dali interlude and black and white (maybe I only saw it in B&W).
Not a bad list but I would drop North by Northwest a few places and elevate Rebecca.
‘Vertigo’ the best movie ever made,I almost fell off my chair when hearing that. Maybe it’s the best to the Americans, their taste in movies is not same as mine.
Many of the movies Bob lists in his article are heaps better…
Thanks for reminding me of Luis Malle, I used to love his films, what happened to him…
See above.
Surely, The Conformist or even The Last Picture Show would have to be considered but not Tammy or King Solomon’s Mines or silly King and I.
As a kid I remember Rin Tin Tin’s German Shepherd being shown in the school hall. We would go berserk afterwards. It is all so subjective!
…I loved the Tin Drum, you can keep your Rin Tin Tin, Gerard.
Vertigo is a great film that works, irrespective of whether, as Bob thinks, the disparity in ages is not great enough to make it believable. It is not however the best film ever; surely Casablanca has the field all to itself and I am surprised it was left out by Bob when he was making comparisons.
It is also certainly a much better film than the lightweight North by Northwest. Now that is a film with an unbelievable story line.
Yes, of course, Casablanca. It is everybody’s third favourite film, and like Danny Boy or When The Saints Go Marching In or Alexander’s Rag Time Band works as well the thousandth time you experience it as it does the first.
Well, Casablanca contains my all time favorite scene: the singing of the Marseillaise in the cafe. We should do lists of the all time great movie scenes. Another favourite of mine is when Peter O’Toole walks through the British Officers Club in Arab dress after his return from Aqaba.
Bobby: Okay, I’ll make it as easy for you as I can. I’d like an omelet, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce and a cup of coffee.
Waitress: A #2, chicken salad sand. Hold the butter, the lettuce, the mayonnaise, and a cup of coffee. Anything else?
Bobby: Yeah, now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven’t broken any rules.
Waitress: You want me to hold the chicken, huh?
Bobby: I want you to hold it between your knees.
Five Easy Pieces
Pretty damned good.
So now we have a Sunday comics section, where we read that old perverts think Vertigo the best film ever? Shameless! How can these (as you say) lecherous cranks make this claim when faced with dozens of contenders for the Best Ever film gong?
It’s a bit like saying Sydney’s the best city in Australia, or ‘Land Down Under’ the best pop song.
Isn’t it curious how hacks and flacks peep through door-cracks into rooms and seeing just thin wedges of the richly furnished interiors pretend to give comprehensive and accurate account of the decor and contents.
It’s who we are, lying machines, through and through, or if not lying, pretending, or ‘misspeaking’ to quote an ugly Americanism. The perverts don’t have a monopoly on the behaviour.
‘He has been travelling for perhaps three hours. His speed is down now, hovering around thirty. He turns a corner and enters a large highway. In the distance he can see the lights.
He feels better; warmer already. The highway takes him towards the lights, the only lights in the world. They are closer. They are here. He turns off the highway and finds himself separated from the lights by a high wire fence. Inside he sees people moving around, laughing, talking. Some are dancing. He drives around the perimeter of the wire, driving over rough unmade roads, through paddocks until, at last he comes to a large gate. The gate is locked and reinforced with heavy duty steel.
Above the gate is a faded sign with peeling paint. It says, “Star Drive-in Theatre, Please turn off your lights.”’
The Deer Hunter for me
It’s not all that bad. I see The Searchers is back in there.
I don’t know where Ellis got the idea that the choice was made by American critics/perverts. The poll was by Sight and Sound, a British magazine and it wasn’t only professional critics who chose their favourites. Here is a quote fom S and S.
” To that end we approached more than 1,000 critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles, and received (in time for the deadline) precisely 846 top-ten lists that between them mention a total of 2,045 different films”.
Good point. How is it possible, not that it’s of any great significance, that any arbiter can say, unchallenged, that such and such is the ‘best film ever’?
By what criteria?
Of course the nub of the problem is that in the second reality anything goes, and given that it’s an egalitarian universe, my best film is just as accurate as yours.
I finally got to see A Royal Affair today. A great film. Thank you Mr Bob Ellis for recommending this film as I would have missed it. Very enjoyable and instructive film.
It shows why Lefties shouldnt be allowed to run government. As the hero failed to balance the budget and mounted the scaffold and slipped on the blood, I paused for a moment to think what’s waiting for Ms Julia Gillard and the rest of her bolshevik gang.
Thank you Mr Bob. Great film.
Recommended.
Go fuck yourself.
Finally saw the movie, loved it…
I take my hat off for the Scandinayans, they were more progressive in 1750 (?) than Australia is now…
Long live Denmark and their FAT TAX too.
Will see Hysteria today or tomorrow, hope it will as enjoyable…
Sorry about the typo: read Scandinavians
Frank You sure you are not Andrew Bolt in drag
Excellent take on Vertigo – I’d never thought of it like that before. Some trivia – the script was co-written by an Aussie, Alec Coppel.
Anyway Bob I’d love to know what your top 20 (or just ten) Australian films were?
In no particular order:
Beneath Hill 60; Snowtown; Samson And Delilah; Wake In Fright; The Year My Voice Broke; Breaker Morant; Newsfront; Romper Stomper; Mad Max; No Worries; Noise; Careless Love; Goodbye Paradise; The Devil’s Playground; Unfinished Sky; Not Suitable For Children; Animal Kingdom; The Lighthorsemen; The Club; Sunday Too Far Away.
Thanks, Bob!
If the Australian “Stories” are the justification for “Australian” films then Newsfront fits the bill as a true snapshot of a regular experience (to some only) but if a single film can exactly capture a true “spirit” of Australia and the Australian character – which has mostly disappeared from view – then Sunday Too far Away is that film.
Surely, ‘The sentimental Bloke’ would have to be Australia’s best effort?
Are you out of your mind?