Special Muriel Award: Best Film of the 1950s

Oh, this one did cause of a lot of grief and hand-wringing. One voter re-dubbed the category "Ten Great Films from the '50s, or: A List That Shortchanges About 40 Masterpieces and Makes Me Tremble in Frustration." Another submitted his list unranked, in alphabetical order, because it was difficult enough pruning the list to ten.

Yet, for all the agonizing over what couldn't be crammed into those meager ten slots (I'm still sick over not finding space to include Rififi), this is the first category this year where the winner was pretty much what I would have guessed. Some certain members of the canon cannot be denied.

Third place:



The Searchers (1956, John Ford) [140 points / 14 ballots]

Second place:



Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock) [181.5/17]

And your winner...





Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock) [221/19]

"If nothing else, Vertigo (1958) is about deception in many forms—and one of those forms is encoded right in the film’s narrative. For about 75 minutes or so, Alfred Hitchcock’s film plays more or less like a standard mystery tale. Sure, this particular mystery certainly has its peculiar elements, dealing as it does with possible spirit possession and other supernatural elements... but the suspense of the film is borne as much out of the standard desire to solve a tantalizing mystery as it is in exploring the characters involved. What is driving the strange behavior of Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak)? Is it indeed a weird spiritual connection with a woman from the past that she’s never met?

All of this is certainly absorbing in the moment... but, in hindsight, it all plays like a mere extended prelude to the film’s final act, in which a film that has so far felt like the usual detective procedural transforms, thanks in part to a devastating midpoint plot turn, into something far more psychologically complex and disturbing.

With Vertigo—and this is what the film’s third act brilliantly drives home—Hitchcock essentially tells a tale of our relationship to the movies. We all look to be seduced by images the way our hero Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) becomes bewitched by the image of Madeleine as he stakes her out. Sometimes we even dive so far into that image that so attracts us that we, in essence, become deeply involved in it, as Scottie becomes emotionally involved with Madeleine; we think about it all the time and maybe even try to understand what lies behind both the image and our own fascination with it. Eventually, though, there is a point in which images simply can’t measure up to reality. In Vertigo, the “death” of Madeleine is the death of an image—but when a devastated Scottie meets the real woman behind Gavin Elster’s carefully manipulated Madeleine image, the increasingly obsessive detective refuses to grasp the human being underneath, preferring that image that so enraptured him in the first place. And the fact that he is willing to essentially recreate a human being just to satisfy his image-driven lust is the source of the film’s unsettling power. Eventually, Scottie realizes the folly of his ways... but by then, it is too late, and he loses both the image and the person.

Vertigo itself lives on to this day as one of the supreme evocations of the intoxicating allure and danger of obsession, cinematic or otherwise. This may be the top Muriels pick for the greatest film of the 1950s, but really, its riches are timeless and, I daresay, universal. In a sense, isn’t cinematic obsession one of the reasons we are all in this game in the first place?" - Kenji Fujishima

See the full results.