How 'Vertigo' went from disappointment to the greatest film of all time

In 1998, the American Film Institute polled film artists and industry professionals on the 100 greatest American movies of all time. Alfred Hitchcock’s landmark psychological thriller “Vertigo” landed at No. 61 on the list. The organization re-polled a decade later. This time, it shot up 52 spots to No. 9. In 2012, the British Film Institute held its decennial critics' poll of the greatest films ever made, regardless of national origin. For 50 years, Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane" had topped the survey. This year, "Vertigo" reigned supreme.

And yet when “Vertigo” opened 60 years ago on May 9, 1958, at San Francisco’s Stage Door Theater, the film was greeted with more shrugs than plaudits. Variety complained that the movie was “too slow and too long,” while Time outright savaged it as “another Hitchcock-and-bull story in which the mystery is not so much who has done it as who cares.” By the time its initial theatrical run wrapped up, “Vertigo” was considered a rare commercial misstep for the Master of Suspense, failing to recoup on its $2.5 million budget.

How could a film now considered to be the pinnacle of cinematic achievement miss the mark with critics and moviegoers the first time around?

Ever a willing self-promoter, Hitchcock, coming off the runaway success of “Rear Window,” significantly elevated his profile in 1955 as the on-camera host of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” television series for CBS. Hitch was now a brand. That he’d accomplished this by straddling the worlds of film and television rankled those in the film industry who believed the “boob tube” an inferior medium. He was too successful and thus due for a takedown.

While Hitchcock was highly regarded by critics and his peers for his skill as a filmmaker (though he never won, he did receive four Academy Award nominations for Best Director), he was not yet recognized as one of the great visual artists of his time. Cahier du Cinéma critic Francois Truffaut had started to bang that drum in France around the time “Vertigo” debuted, but few in America were willing to consider thrillers and adventures works of art. Hitchcock was viewed as an entertainer, and his movies were judged strictly on their pulse-quickening attributes. Did the moviegoers get their money's worth?

Hitchcock had made some conceptually daring movies since setting up shop in Hollywood (the single-setting “Lifeboat,” the Dalí-tinged “Spellbound” and the shot-in-long-takes “Rope”), but he’d never challenged audiences like he does in the first hour of “Vertigo.” The hypnotic Saul Bass-designed opening credits, lushly accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s symphonic score, were certainly trippy for the time, but hardly new (Bass’s graphic design work had made a splash years earlier in Otto Preminger’s “The Man With the Golden Arm”). It’s how the film settles into its narrative that threw viewers.