Hitchcock complained that he would have preferred Vera Miles, as was originally planned, rather than Kim Novak for the double lead role in Vertigo. The director lamented what he himself considered a “flaw in the story” at the moment in which the husband (Elster) throws his wife’s body from the bell tower (“How could I know that James Stewart was not going going up the stairs?”). And he was even sad that that film in which he put so much effort and for which he risked so much barely “covered expenses.”
And despite everything, and amid so many complaints that he made explicit in the now legendary conversation with François Truffaut, the film that the director directed in 1958 just before with death on his heels two years from now Psychosis It remains there, imperturbable, converted into, by order, a touchstone, a battle horse and even a scapegoat for all unanimities and each of the dissents.
A cult object for some, a hunting object for others and a perfect summary of everything that cinema has been capable of for the latter (especially for the magazine Sight and Sound that for decades has kept it at number 1 in all of history until it arrived Jeanne Dielman, by Chantal Akerman), the myth of Vertigo it never ends.
The story, based on the novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, of the detective suffering from vertigo who one day sees his daily life assaulted by the most esoteric of assignments (chasing a possessed woman), until he himself ends up possessed by passion. , continues to stand as a peak example of the power of cinema to alter consciences, as a target of gender studies and as a simple enigma.
The last proof of its timelessness and contemporaneity at the same time, the summit of classic cinema and the first step of modernity, is provided by the essay fatal fiction (Taurus) by the professor of Political Science Manuel Arias Maldonado. «You could say that the first reason for a book like this is autobiographical. It is one of the films for which I have been passionate since I was a teenager,” says the author by way of preamble.