Giving De Palma His Due

If Vertigo’s unseating of Citizen Kane from the recent Sight & Sound “Best Movie Ever” poll speaks to anything, it’s the long process of reclamation that can expand a film’s life indefinitely. Unlike Welles’ instantly canonized masterpiece, Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller was largely ignored upon its original theatrical run. Yet over the decades, Vertigo’s richness seems to have revealed itself, helped in large part by the sweeping recuperation of Hitchcock as more than just a workmanlike director of light capers and studio thrillers. Hitchcock’s Films (a 1965 book by British-Canadian critic Robin Wood) and François Truffaut’s Hitchcock interviews collection, Hitchcock/Truffaut, helped circulate the notion of Hitchcock as the film artist of the 20th century, and of Vertigo as more than “just” a film about obsession and mistaken identity.