Terrence Rafferty in the NYT notes the fiftieth anniversary of Vertigo, depending on where you sit a bottomless masterpiece or one of Hitchcock’s most arbitrary concoctions. Rafferty is in the first category and makes a case for its difficulties:

This movie isn’t constructed, as most thrillers are, to get us from point A to point B as swiftly and as efficiently as possible. “Vertigo” instead circles compulsively around a set of visual and verbal (and musical) motifs — spirals, towers, bouquets, the words “too late” — which keep bringing us back to the same places, turning us in relentlessly on ourselves. There’s a wonderful scene in which Scottie follows Madeleine through the dizzying streets of San Francisco to his own home. He looks puzzled, utterly disoriented, and the viewer knows exactly how he feels.

Rafferty also makes this sophisticated point:

Seeing “Vertigo” on DVD is maybe a shade less overwhelming, less deranging, than seeing it as its first audience did, but it has the compensating quality of seeming a more solitary and more intimate experience, and this is, always has been, a movie that makes you want to be alone with it.

I don’t agree, though; I think the film was made to create a mass hallucinatory effect, and Hitchcock was not, of course, making a movie for home viewing. I was working in San Francisco in the 1990s, when Harris and Katz’s restoration of the film had its world premiere at the magnificent and huge Castro Theater. (My former colleague Michael Sragow’s exhaustive history of the film’s creation and restoration is here.) The film played, night after sold-out night, and I don’t think anyone who was there will forget the exhilarating, disconcerting experience.