Pauline Kael dismissed this box-office disappointment as 'Hitchcock scraping bottom.' It's neither the complete dud it was initially considered nor the neglected masterpiece many Hitch devotees now say it is.At its center is a hero (Sean Connery) who feels powerful sexual desire for a lovely, frigid thief (Tippi Hedren); Hitchcock said he was drawn to the story by its fetishistic aspects (was he ever not?). In that case, he was wrong to cast Connery, a suave actor who was still too strongly associated with James Bond back then to be persuasive as anything else, and who doesn't happen to be good at this Vertigo type of possessive obsession. With him in the lead, the movie inescapably becomes about how this virile man tries to defrost a dysfunctional woman.Hitchcock does pull it together for the revelatory climax, but the film is punishingly long and, despite the professionalism on all levels, not especially moving or interesting. Hitchcock's next was the even more tedious 'Torn Curtain.'
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