Rating of
4/4
"I heard voices."
Arbogast1960 - wrote on 03/28/08
Such a beautiful, beautiful movie. It's like watching a dream. Hitchcock uses Stewart better than anyone ever did, taking his innate Everyman sensibility and placing it in the most disturbing of situations. Stewart shines as the melancholiac who can't stop obsessing over a woman who never really existed. Although Hitchcock hated Novak and her performance, she is more than serviceable; her woodenness, usually such a distracting liability, actually works to her advantage, both in playing up the creepy, dreamlike/necrophiliac overtones and in retrospect after we find who she "really" is. (This is no surprise--Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren all bear witness to Hitch's talents in this regard.)
The San Francisco setting is lovingly photographed in rich color, with the winding streets lending themselves to the film's tortuous plot. The use of color (especially of green, used to signal ghosts in the Victorian tradition) is splendid. And not to be forgotten is Barbara Bel Geddes, who helps ground the film and lets us believe Stewart's Scotty might actually be a real person (with a lovelorn past ready to be wiped away by the right object of desire). The decision to reveal the "big twist" well before the finale is brilliant, casting the final scenes in a much more heartrending light. And the ending is superb, as Hitchcock deftly avoids the happy endings that the PCA so often sought to impose, and instead lets the film reach its logical--albeit bleak--conclusion. A true masterpiece.
