So I’m saying “AFI Movies” here, because we watched this based on the AFI podcast, but also this is the #1 movie on that Sight & Sound list (where it beat out Citizen Kane in 2012, ending that movie’s long reign at first place). So this one has a little more cred than most of the AFI movies.

But I have to say, I think this is a case where I really don’t agree with the S&S people. I don’t think this is the best movie of all time; I don’t even think it’s the best Hitchcock movie. I can’t talk about this one without getting into spoilers, so behind the cut, I’m going to assume you’ve seen the movie, and will freely spoil it.

Spoilers

Okay, so the thing about this is, you’ve got a plot that is more than slightly nonsensical on its face — if you want to kill your wife, there are a lot easier ways than doing some kind of elaborate body-double faux-possession faux-suicide long con. Like, honestly, when the murder went down, there are about 45 places that the thing could have been discovered (such as, oh I don’t know, the guy dragging his real dead wife’s body up to this tower and hoping nobody noticed, never mind the aftermath), and the chances for someone to discover the problem after the murder are way higher with this many lies and layers of deception having gone into it. Like, shit, if they’d asked Jimmy Stewart to identify the body, he would have been like “wait no that’s not her, wtf.”

So okay, as a literal story, it’s just pulpy silliness, which must mean that its greatness comes on a kind of metaphorical level about identity and the performances with which we construct our selves. The part where Jimmy tries to remake Kim Novak into the woman he knew is certainly going hard at that: Was it her that he fell in love with, or the person she was pretending to be, and where is the line between them?

Fine as far as it goes, and along with Hitchcock’s virtuoso talents, it goes a reasonably long way. I’m not gonna fight this on the AFI list for sure — this is easily top tier AFI — and I wouldn’t fight it being somewhere in that S&S 100. But like… I don’t know, I think Bergman’s Persona handles some of those themes in a tighter (and more psychological horror) kind of way.

But I don’t know, maybe not being tight is where the draw comes in. Like, the integration of a screwball comedy into this murder mystery isn’t exactly a negative point — Midge is a great character, and I’d love to see more scenes with her in them — but it’s also a weird tonal discontinuity with this spiraling tale of obsession and fear. Is that discontinuity what fascinates viewers? That, precisely by not making, y’know, sense as such, it makes the movie weirder and richer? (One of the things that is absolutely true about critics’ lists is that, as people who watch tons of movies, they are bored by formula and fascinated by things that fuck with formula and go a little weird.)

Maybe, but it didn’t really do it for me. Long story short, it’s a good movie, it’s absolutely worth watching, and if people want to put it on 100-item “best of” lists, I think that makes a lot of sense. But when you start talking about top-tier best-of-all-time type stuff, even taking as a given that it’s an inherently subjective exercise to do so, I’m not on board.