50th Anniversary of One of the Best Movies Ever

Link to New York Times assessment.

Quote from "50 Years of Dizzy, Courtesy of Hitchcock": 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. It wasn’t what they had come to expect from Hitchcock, the beloved portly “master of suspense,” who had been making impishly macabre thrillers for 30-some years and had since 1955 also been the host and impresario of a very popular mystery-story anthology series on television.

Well, we do know that the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences weren't particularly impressed at the time.

"Vertigo" was not among the nominees for Best Picture: "Auntie Mame", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "The Defiant One", "Gigi", "Separate Tables". (The now unwatchable "Gigi" won the Oscar.)

Alfred Hitchcock was not among the nominees for Best Director (Weirdest choice: Mark Robson for "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness." Vincente Minnelli won for "Gigi", back in the day when bloated musicals and cast-of-thousands epics held sway.

Barbara Bel Geddes could have been nominated for Best Supporting Actress in place of the one-note screech of Peggy Cass in "Auntie Mame".

Robert Burks, director of photography who had been working with Hitchcock since 1951's "Strangers on a Train", wasn't nominated for Best Cinematography (Color). But there's that pesky "Auntie Mame" again.

And how could Bernard Herrmann not receive a nomination in the Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture category?

50 years later, though, "Vertigo" has more than received its due. It now ranks 9th on the American Film Institute's Top 100 films of all time -- the 10th anniversary edition.