Friday Night Special - The Heights Of Ecstasy!

Vertico (1958)

Starring: Jimmie Stewart, Hope Lange Directed by: Sir Alfred Hitchcock Rating: R Genre: Romance Other

Friday Night Special - Friday Night Special is a special feature of Oswald's Screen Scene. Here we present reviews of movies that we feel may be of particular interest to those special lovers looking for that magical mood-setter of a date flick that just might ignite the passions bubbling under the surface during the last work day of the week. Is this "The One"? Or just "One of Those Things?" Let us be your guide! Review Ply those who knew The Master with a few potent potions and they just might spill the beans about the so-called Suspense-meister - and those beans just might surprise you. Hitch was a well-known romantic who often locked his wife Alma up in the highest turret of their Scotts Valley mansion for weeks at a time, reading to her from the works of erotic magus "Rumi" while Ravel's "Caballero" droned endlessly through the forest. Legend is that even the snails tasted sweeter when Hitch had an extended romantic stay at "Le Chateau." Exhibit #1 for those gimlet-eyed skeptics is his fevered ode to l'esprit d'escalier - "Vertico." Vertico, as the medicos among you may know, is a disease of the mind that causes normally sane people to vomit when climbing anything taller than a matchbox. Jimmie Stewart ("The Philadephia Experiment", "Destry Rides A Donkey") plays "Heathcliff", a former cop who accidentally killed an entire circus while investigating the nefarious  activities of a tiny, mustachioed highwire artist. Retired and living in shame, he meets a woman (Hope Lange - "That Touch of Hare")  who reminds him of a woman who tried to kill him in a previous life when he was a Spanish Grandee living on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. The plot's nonsense, of course. There never was a Barbary Coast of San Francisco (The real Barbary Coast is an island off of the island of Tripoli, populated exclusively by apes - maybe Hitch was thinking of Santa Barbara?) But the love story between Stewart and Lange is the real thing - their chemistry burns a hole right through the cellulose and into your heart. By the climax, when Stewart throws Lange from Coit Tower into the San Francisco bay because she reminds him of the countess who mocked his love poems ("There was once a Countess from Cork...") only to realize she was NOT the Countess but a modern woman who needs love like any modern woman who needs love, you can't help but melt for this bag of juddering, throbbing pain. Who hasn't wanted to throw a woman (or even a child?) from the top of Coit Tower only to realize it was only one of the squares of pink popcorn that always seem stale and whose kernel shells manage to work their way between your gums and teeth only to realize it's really a dream and your innamorata is four thousand miles away sharing a double-zip Mountain Hardware down bag  that was a special birthday present with a part-time tour guide name Nigel who claims to make his own cider? Of course it may mean something different to you, which is the beauty of the movies. Regardless, I COMMAND YOU to rent this gem, curl up with the bepelted pet of your choice, some Nyquil and Limoncello on the rocks and make a night of it. You will not be disappointed. I "guarantee" it!