Contemporaneous reception Initial critical reception for
Vertigo was mixed.
Variety wrote that the film showed Hitchcock's "mastery", but felt the film was "too long and slow" for "what is basically only a psychological murder mystery". Similarly, Philip K. Scheuer of the
Los Angeles Times admired the scenery, but found the plot took "too long to unfold" and felt it "bogs down in a maze of detail". Scholar Dan Auiler says that this review "sounded the tone that most popular critics would take with the film". However, the
Los Angeles Examiner loved it, admiring the "excitement, action, romance, glamor and [the] crazy, off-beat love story".
The New York Times film critic
Bosley Crowther also gave
Vertigo qualified praise by stating that "[the] secret [of the film] is so clever, even though it is devilishly far-fetched."
Richard L. Coe of
The Washington Post praised the film as a "wonderful weirdie," writing that "Hitchcock has even more fun than usual with trick angles, floor shots and striking use of color. More than once he gives us critical scenes in long shots establishing how he's going to get away with a couple of story tricks."
John McCarten of
The New Yorker wrote derisively that Hitchcock had "never before indulged in such farfetched nonsense." The
New York Post review echoed many critics': "Let's admit it right now. Hitchcock's surfaces are so smooth he thinks he can get away with murder in the logic and realism departments. If you want to tear 'Vertigo' apart, it rips easily. On the other hand, there's no denying that James Stewart's unactorish acting carries a heavy air of reality into the picture, and Kim Novak's somnambulistic behavior, called for by the script, is something she can do to perfection....It's doubtful that 'Vertigo' can take equal rank with the best of the Hitchcock studies—it has too many holes—but it assays high in visual confectionary of place, person, and celluloid wiles." Contemporaneous response in England was summarized by Charles Barr in his monograph on
Vertigo: "In England, the reception was if anything rather less friendly. Of the 28 newspaper and magazine reviews that I have looked at, six are, with reservations, favourable, nine are very mixed, and 13 almost wholly negative. Common to all of these reviews is a lack of sympathy with the basic structure and drive of the picture. Even the friendlier ones single out for praise elements that seem, from today's perspective, to be marginal virtues and incidental pleasures – the 'vitality' of the supporting performances (Dilys Powell in
The Sunday Times), the slickness with which the car sequences are put together (Isobel Quibley in
The Spectator)". In France,
Éric Rohmer noted in
Cahiers du Cinéma that "
Vertigo, so they say, repelled Americans. French critics, on the contrary, seem to be giving it a warm welcome." Praising the film's formal technique, he wrote that "ideas and forms follow the same road, and it is because the form is pure, beautiful, rigorous, astonishingly rich, and free that we can say that Hitchcock's films, with
Vertigo at their head, are about
ideas, in the noble, platonic sense of the word." Hitchcock fans were not pleased with
Vertigo's departure from the romantic-thriller territory of earlier films, or with the mystery being solved well before the film's ending.
Orson Welles disliked the film, telling
Henry Jaglom that it was "worse" than
Rear Window, which he had also disliked. In an interview with
François Truffaut, Hitchcock stated that
Vertigo was one of his favourite films, with some reservations. He blamed the film's limited success on the 49-year-old Stewart looking too old to play a convincing love interest for the 24-year-old Novak. A young
Martin Scorsese viewed the film with his friends during its original theatrical run, and later recalled that "even though the film was not well received at the time... we responded to the film very strongly. [We] didn't know why... but we really went with the picture." The film received awards at the
San Sebastián International Film Festival, including a Silver Seashell for Best Director for Hitchcock (tied with
Mario Monicelli for
Big Deal on Madonna Street) and Best Actor for Stewart (tied with
Kirk Douglas in
The Vikings). The film was nominated for two technical
Academy Awards for
Best Art Direction – Black-and-White or Color (
Hal Pereira,
Henry Bumstead,
Samuel M. Comer,
Frank McKelvy) and
Best Sound (
George Dutton).
Re-evaluation Over time the film has been re-evaluated by film critics and has moved higher in esteem in most critics' opinions. Every ten years since 1952, the
British Film Institute magazine
Sight and Sound has asked the world's leading film critics to compile a list of the ten
greatest films of all time. In the 1962 and 1972 polls,
Vertigo was not among the top 10 films in voting; only in 1982, after Hitchcock's death, did
Vertigo enter the list, in seventh place. By 1992 it had advanced to fourth place, by 2002 to second, and in 2012 to first place in both the crime genre and overall, ahead of previous first-place entry
Citizen Kane; in the 2022 poll, it took second place behind
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. In the 2012
Sight & Sound director's poll of the greatest films ever made
Vertigo was ranked seventh; In the 2002 and 2022 editions of the directors' list the film ranked sixth. Commenting upon the 2012 results, the magazine's editor Nick James said that
Vertigo was "the ultimate critics' film. It is a dream-like film about people who are not sure who they are but who are busy reconstructing themselves and each other to fit a kind of cinema ideal of the ideal soul-mate." In 1998,
Time Out conducted a poll in which
Vertigo was voted the fifth greatest film of all time.
The Village Voice ranked
Vertigo at No. 3 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.
Entertainment Weekly voted it the 19th Greatest film of all time in 1999. In January 2002, the film was included on the list of the "Top 100 Essential Films of All Time" by the
National Society of Film Critics. In 2009, the film was ranked at No. 10 on Japanese film magazine
Kinema Junpos
Top 10 Non-Japanese Films of All Time list. In 2022,
Time Out magazine ranked the film at No.15 on their list of "The 100 best thriller films of all time". Already in the 1960s,
Cahiers du Cinéma critics had begun re-evaluating Hitchcock as a serious artist. The film ranked eighth on
Cahiers du Cinémas
Top 10 Films of the Year List in 1959. However, even
François Truffaut's
1962 book of interviews with Hitchcock devotes only a few pages to
Vertigo. Dan Auiler has suggested that the real beginning of
Vertigos re-evaluation was the 1968 publication of British-Canadian scholar
Robin Wood's book ''Hitchcock's Films'', which called it "Hitchcock's masterpiece to date and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us". Adding to its mystique was the fact that
Vertigo was one of five Hitchcock-owned films removed from circulation in 1973. When
Vertigo was re-released in theaters in October 1983, and then on home video in October 1984, it achieved commercial success and laudatory reviews. The October 1996 showing of a restored print on
70 mm film with
DTS sound at the
Castro Theatre in San Francisco was met with a similarly strong reception. In his 1996 review of the film, critic
Roger Ebert gave it four stars out of four and included it in his list of
The Great Movies. A minority of critics have expressed dissenting opinions. In his 2004 book
Blockbuster, British film critic
Tom Shone suggested that
Vertigos critical re-evaluation has led to excessive praise: "Hitchcock is a director who delights in getting his plot mechanisms buffed up to a nice humming shine, and so the
Sight and Sound team praise the one film of his in which this is not the case – it's all loose ends and lopsided angles, its plumbing out on display for the critic to pick over at his leisure." In 1989,
Vertigo was recognized as a "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" film by the United States
Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the
National Film Registry in the first year of the registry's voting. In 2005,
Vertigo was ranked at number two in
Total Film magazine's
100 Greatest Movies of All Time, behind only
Goodfellas. In 2008, an
Empire poll of readers, actors, and critics named it the 40th greatest movie ever made. The film was voted at No. 8 on the 2008 list of "100 Greatest Films" by
Cahiers du Cinéma. In 2010,
The Guardian ranked it as the third-best crime film of all time.
Vertigo ranked third on the
BBC's 2015 list of the 100 greatest American films. On
review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 93% based on 98 reviews, with an average rating of 8.90/10. The website's critics' consensus deems it "an unpredictable scary thriller that doubles as a mournful meditation on love, loss, and human comfort". As of February 2024,
Vertigo is one of only fourteen films with a perfect score on
Metacritic (two other Hitchcock films,
Notorious and
Rear Window, are also on the list). The most recent edition of the
American Film Institute's top 100 films of all time, released in
2007, placed Vertigo at number nine, up 52 positions from its placement at number 61 in the original 1998 list.
American Film Institute recognition •
AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (1998) #61 •
AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills (2001) #18 •
AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions (2002) #18 •
AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores (2005) #12 •
AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) (2007) #9 •
AFI's 10 Top 10 (2008) #1 Mystery The San Francisco locations have become celebrated amongst the film's fans, with organized tours across the area. In March 1997, the French magazine
Les Inrockuptibles published a special issue about ''Vertigo's
locations in San Francisco, Dans le décor''. Directors
Martin Scorsese and
Denis Villeneuve have listed
Vertigo as among their favorite films of all time. The renewed public appreciation for
Vertigo is accompanied by a growing body of academic scholarship. Conferences like the Annual International Vertigo conference, for instance, showcase this trend, as evidenced by its 2018 event at
Trinity College Dublin.
Critical works on Vertigo •
Robin Wood's chapter on
Vertigo in ''Hitchcock's Films'' •
Molly Haskell's essay, "With Paintbrush and Mirror: 'Vertigo' & 'As You Desire Me in
The Village Voice •
Laura Mulvey's
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, popularizing the concept of the
male gaze Classification as film noir Critical opinion is divided on whether or not
Vertigo should be considered an example of
film noir. Some consider it a film noir on the basis of plot and tone and various motifs, despite it having
mid-century modern visuals typical of the 1950s. Others say the use of
Technicolor, color symbolism, and the specificity of Hitchcock's vision exclude it from the category. Nicholas Christopher, Robert Ottoson, and Silver and Ward, for instance, do not include
Vertigo in their filmographies of film noir. By contrast, Foster Hirsch describes
Vertigo as among the Hitchcock films that are "richly, demonstrably
noir". ==Derivative works==