Vertigo @ 50.

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, #2 in Sight & Sound's 2002 "Critics' Top Ten Poll," premiered in San Francisco on May 9, 1958.

Updated through 5/11.

Update, 5/10: "You can't help wondering what those first Bay Area viewers 50 years ago must have thought as they watched this strange, drifty, hallucinatory romance unfold on the big screen, with the strains of Bernard Herrmann's lush score - brazenly echoing the 'Liebestod' from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde - swelling on the soundtrack," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "For a movie so revered, Vertigo hasn't been terribly influential. The films that try hardest to recapture its twisted, doomy romanticism, like Brian De Palma's 1976 Obsession (with a score by Mr Herrmann) and Mike Figgis's 1991 Liebestraum (in which [Kim] Novak plays a supporting role), always wind up proving that Hitchcock's dark vision is too wayward, too eccentric to be imitated: there's never enough wandering in them."

Update, 5/11: "As Vertigo turns 50 this weekend, I'm reminded of Edward Dmytryk's 1952 The Sniper," writes Dave Kehr. It "is very likely one of the first films - using the new, more mobile equipment that emerged in the late 40s - to take full advantage as San Francisco as a location, transforming the city's famously vertiginous geography into a metaphor for its protagonist's unstable mental state." What's more, "If Hitchcock mined The Sniper for Vertigo, he seems also to have remembered it in constructing Psycho.

Posted by dwhudson at May 9, 2008 2:00 PM