The Guardian (01/Aug/2012) - Vertigo's rise up the film critics' top 10 is a fascinating case study in reputation

(c) Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian (01/Aug/2012)

Vertigo's rise up the film critics' top 10 is a fascinating case study in reputation

Alfred Hitchcock's psychological thriller has overtaken Citizen Kane, but the list reveals too much caution among critics

The king is dead, long live the king? Sight and Sound magazine has published its 10-yearly critics' poll of the greatest films, and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane – in the No 1 slot since 1962 – has finally been toppled by Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 psychological thriller Vertigo, starring James Stewart as the retired, troubled police officer who becomes obsessed with a woman's eerie resemblance to someone he once had under surveillance. For some observers, irritated by nerdy lists, Vertigo's triumph is hardly more significant than John McEnroe finally beating Bjorn Borg for the Wimbledon men's singles in 1981. Others may simply feel that one form of reflex critical orthodoxy has replaced another.

Vertigo is a fascinating case study in reputation. It wasn't all that much liked on release, and its critical prestige accumulated only gradually. Vertigo did not appear anywhere on the Sight and Sound poll for the first three decades, jumped in at No 7 in 1982, No 4 in 1992, No 2 in 2002 and now the gold medal. It's a brilliant and intriguing film in many ways, boasting an intense, careworn performance from Stewart, though with a narrative "reveal" that arrives disconcertingly early on. My own theory is that Vertigo's rise in esteem coincides with academic critical fascination with female sexuality and the male "gaze". The world is ruled by men; they see what they want to see, and the visibility and comprehensibility of women's emotional lives are constructed by the male observer: Stewart's agonised cop Scottie thinks a beautiful woman is the reincarnation of another. How irrational is he being?

I feel that Vertigo is inferior to Hitchcock's other more brutally explicit psychological thriller Psycho, but that a persistent gentility in the critical world feels it necessary to reward the classier and more subtle film, and Psycho, for all that it is adored, has the genre taint of "horror" which keeps it out of lists like these.

It is sad to see Singin' in the Rain drop out of the top 10, and also that The Godfathers I and II (No 4 in 2002) have vanished. John Ford's gritty The Searchers (1956) is still a critical darling and Kubrick's 2001 (1968) is the most recent film on the list. Perhaps it is the stunning success of the recent Oscar-winning The Artist that has triggered a new interest in silent movies, and brought in three silents to the 2012 poll: Sunrise (1927) by FW Murnau (up two places from its No 7 ranking in 2002), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) by Carl Theodor Dreyer and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which makes its Sight and Sound poll debut. Among the European masters, Renoir's Rules of the Game is at No 4 and Fellini's 8½ is hanging in at No 10, but Bergman is not there, and Antonioni's L'Avventura – for decades an absolute shoo-in – has been excluded, and this his centenary year too.

It's not a bad list, though it's interesting how cautious critics are about rewarding recent films. When the Sight and Sound 1952 poll was published, and cinema itself hardly more than 50 years old, it boldly gave the No 1 slot to De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, then just four years old – and there are many who would agree with that placing now. It would have been exciting to see some films from the past 10 years in the 2012 list.

Sight and Sound's list

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)
Sunrise (FW Murnau, 1927)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1927)
8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)