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A key consideration of his work & positing of his position as an Auteur

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From The Guardian

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he unbearably sad, exquisitely macabre love story that is Vertigo now reaches its 60th birthday, and this week sees its rerelease, not much liked on first appearing in 1958 but now hugely canonical and prestigious, recently unseating Citizen Kane at the top of the Sight and Sound critics' poll, due very much to unending critical interest in "the male gaze", pioneered by theorists such as Michel Foucault and Laura Mulvey. This is that act of seeing that, so far from being transparent and neutral, is an imposition of power, and therefore extremely applicable to this drama of obsession and voyeurism, although I never tire of pointing out that there are very few members of the hetero-patriarchy who have the confidence or fanatical connoisseurship to pick out a woman's clothes or exactly specify her hairstyle. Vertigo also combines in an almost unique balance Hitchcock's brash flair for psychological shocks with his elegant genius for dapper stylishness. Like Psycho, it ends in an "o", or maybe "oh!" The ancient house adjoining the Bates motel in Psycho certainly has an unearthly similarity to San Francisco's creepy old McKitterick Hotel in Vertigo.

James Stewart plays ex-cop Scottie, invalided out of the police due to vertigo brought on by a traumatic and shaming calamity during a rooftop chase. He is hired by old schoolfriend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) for a strange job: to shadow his beautiful and enigmatic wife Madeline ( Kim Novak) whose behaviour is worrying him. This bizarre situation unlocks lonely Scottie's gallantry and romanticism and he falls passionately in love with this mysterious, troubled woman with her quiet, wondering voice and the manner of a sleepwalker. And later, when his vertigo prevents him from stopping another disaster, Scottie is to fall in love with another woman, Kansas-born Judy Barton, who has an eerie similarity to Madeline. With fanatical dedication, Scottie forces Judy to dress and sound like his lost love.

There are two ways of approaching Vertigo. One is to see it as a male film on the side of the male view of women; the other is to see it as a satirical attack on the misogynist mindset. They are, in fact, two sides of the same interpretative coin. The imaginative sympathies and dramatic voltage are wired up to Scottie's anguished point of view. (Actually, Hitchcock did make a film from the viewpoint of the woman, the female gazee, forced by a controlling man into the shoes of his obsessed-over first love - Rebecca.)

One of the film's most brilliant moments concerns Scottie's platonic pal and ex-girlfriend Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), a commercial artist in whose messy bohemian apartment Scottie is in the habit of hanging out. Midge crucially wears glasses, the sort that in other circumstances might be removed by someone saying: "Why Miss Wood, you're beautiful!" These glasses are there to make her less attractive and signal that she is not the movie's romantic interest, but also that she herself is a seer, a gazer - noticing from afar evidence of Scottie and Madeleine's affair with a wry smile, but also perhaps a twinge of the heart.

Platonic pals ... Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge with James Stewart as Scottie. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount Pictures

Inspired by Scottie telling her about Madeleine's own trance-like obsession with a 19th-century portrait of a beautiful tragic ancestor, Midge paints herself in the same pose: glasses and all. When he sees it, Scottie winces. So do we, the audience. The pure wrongness is shocking: smart, wry, detached Midge is completely wrong in the role. The portrait has to be of someone infinitely, demurely, fatally passive and gazed upon - not a humorous, intelligent woman with her own visual judgment and indeed her own job.

The Freudian images are everywhere in Vertigo, and not simply in the showstopping dream sequences or the nightmarish light-filter changes bringing out the hypnotic pale blue of Stewart's eyes. The "brassiere" or bra that Midge is drawing for an ad is cantilevered, she says, like a bridge - thus associating the famous Golden Gate Bridge scene with a woman's underwear. (When Scottie brings Madeleine back to his apartment after saving her from drowning, he undresses her and puts her in bed while she is still unconscious: although perhaps he left her underwear in place. It isn't clear.) The tower could be phallic, and the nestling nosegay of flowers that Madeline buys is also emblematic of something, though not as obviously as the tight whorl of hair at the back of her head: a mesmeric circle (again, like bloody water circling a drain) or an orifice of some sort.

When I watched this again, I felt more strongly than ever that Hitchcock's decision to give us a story in which the Clouzot-esque twist is given away well before the end is no misjudgment. It is a brilliant way of putting us inside Judy's tormented, guilty soul, and of avoiding, just for a while, that male gaze. I also realised what it is Vertigo has been subtly reminding me of for many years: Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. A treat to see this back on the big screen.

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Vertigo review - still spinning its dizzying magic

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he unbearably sad, exquisitely macabre love story that is Vertigo now reaches its 60th birthday, and this week sees its rerelease, not much liked on first appearing in 1958 but now hugely canonical and prestigious, recently unseating Citizen Kane at the top of the Sight and Sound critics' poll, due very much to unending critical interest in "the male gaze", pioneered by theorists such as Michel Foucault and Laura Mulvey.

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"Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints"

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by Pauline Kael

Ridley Scott, the director of the futuristic thriller Blade Runner, sets up the action with a crawl announcing that the time is early in the twenty-first century, and that a blade runner is a police officer who "retires''-i.e., kills-"replicants," the powerful humanoids manufactured by genetic engineers, if they rebel against their drudgery in the space colonies and show up on Earth. A title informs us that we're in Los Angeles in the year 2019, and then Scott plunges us into a hellish, claustrophobic city that has become a cross between Newark and old Singapore. The skies are polluted, and there's a continual drenching rainfall. The air is so rotten that it's dark outside, yet when we're inside, the brightest lights are on the outside, from the giant searchlights scanning the city and shining in. A huge, squat pyramidal skyscraper (the new architecture appears to be Mayan and Egyptian in inspiration) houses the offices of the Tyrell Corporation, which produces those marvels of energy the replicants, who are faster and stronger than human beings, and even at the top, in the penthouse of Tyrell himself, there's dust hanging in the smoky air. (You may find yourself idly wondering why this bigwig inventor can't produce a humble little replicant to do some dusting.)
The congested-megalopolis sets are extraordinary, and they're lovingly, perhaps obsessively, detailed; this is the future as a black market, made up of scrambled sordid aspects of the past-Chinatown, the Casbah, and Times Square, with an enormous, mesmerizing ad for Coca-Cola, and Art Deco neon signs everywhere, in a blur of languages. Blade Runner, which cost thirty million dollars, has its own look, and a visionary sci-fi movie that has its own look can't be ignored-it has its place in film history. But we're always aware of the sets as sets, partly because although the impasto of decay is fascinating, what we see doesn't mean anything to us. (It's 2019 back lot.) Ridley Scott isn't great on mise en scène-we're never sure exactly what part of the city we're in, or where it is in relation to the scene before and the scene after. (Scott seems to be trapped in his own alleyways, without a map.) And we're not caught up in the pulpy suspense plot, which involves the hero, Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former blade runner forced to come back to hunt down four murderous replicants who have blended into the swarming street life. (The term "blade runner" actually comes from the title of a William Burroughs novel, which has no connection with the movie.) It's a very strange tenderloin that Ridley Scott and his associates have concocted: except for Deckard and stray Hari Krishna-ites and porcupine headed punks, there are few Caucasians (and not many blacks, either). The population seems to be almost entirely ethnic-poor, hustling Asians and assorted foreigners, who are made to seem not quite degenerate, perhaps, but oddly subhuman. They're all selling, dealing, struggling to get along; they never look up- they're intent on what they're involved in, like slot machine zealots in Vegas. You know that Deckard is a breed apart, because he's the only one you see who reads a newspaper. Nothing much is explained (except in that opening crawl), but we get the vague impression that the more prosperous, clean cut types have gone off world to some Scarsdale in space.
Here we are-only forty years from now-in a horrible electronic slum, and Blade Runner never asks, "How did this happen?" The picture treats this grimy, retrograde future as a given-a foregone conclusion, which we're not meant to question. The presumption is that man is now fully realized as a spoiler of the earth. The sci-fi movies of the past were often utopian or cautionary; this film seems indifferent, blasé, and maybe, like some of the people in the audience, a little pleased by this view of a medieval future-satisfied in a slightly vengeful way. There's a subject, though, lurking around the comic strip edges: What does it mean to be human? Tracking down the replicants, who are assumed not to have any feelings, Deckard finds not only that they suffer and passionately want to live but that they are capable of acts of generosity. They have become far more human than the scavenging people left on Earth. Maybe Scott and the scriptwriters (Hampton Fancher and David Peoples), who adapted the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by the late Philip K. Dick, shied away from this subject because it has sticky, neo-Fascist aspects. But this underlying idea is the only promising one in the movie, and it has a strong visual base: when a manufactured person looks just like a person born of woman-when even the eyes don't tell you which is which-how do you define the difference?
Scott's creepy, oppressive vision requires some sort of overriding idea-something besides spoofy gimmicks, such as having Deckard narrate the movie in the loner-in-the-big-city manner of a Hammett or Chandler private eye. This voice over, which is said to have been a late addition, sounds ludicrous, and it breaks the visual hold of the material. The dialogue isn't well handled, either. Scott doesn't seem to have a grasp of how to use words as part of the way a movie moves. Blade Runner is a suspenseless thriller; it appears to be a victim of its own imaginative use of hardware and miniatures and mattes. At some point, Scott and the others must have decided that the story was unimportant; maybe the booming, lewd and sultry score by Chariots-for-Hire Vangelis that seems to come out of the smoke convinced them that the audience would be moved even if vital parts of the story were trimmed. Vangelis gives the picture so much film noir overload that he fights Scott's imagery; he chomps on it, stomps on it, and drowns it.
Blade Runner doesn't engage you directly; it forces passivity on you. It sets you down in this lopsided maze of a city, with its post human feeling, and keeps you persuaded that something bad is about to happen. Some of the scenes seem to have six subtexts but no text, and no context either. There are suggestions of Nicolas Roeg in the odd, premonitory atmosphere, but Roeg gives promise of something perversely sexual. With Scott, it's just something unpleasant or ugly. The dizzying architectural angles (we always seem to be looking down from perilous heights) and the buglike police cars that lift off in the street and rise straight up in the canyons between the tall buildings and drop down again give us a teasing kind of vertigo. Scott goes much further, though. He uses way-off-kilter angles that produce not nausea, exactly, but a queasiness that prepares us for the feelings of nausea that Deckard is then seen to have. And, perhaps because of the what-is-a-human-being remnant in the story, the picture keeps Deckard-and us-fixated on eyes. (The characters' perambulations include a visit to the eye maker who supplies the Tyrrell genetic engineers with human eyes, and he turns out to be a wizened old Chinese gent-as if eyemaking were an ancient art. Maybe Tyrell picks up some used elbows in Saigon. His methods of operation for creating replicant slaves out of living cell tissue seem as haphazard as bodywork on wrecked cars.) In Nicolas Roeg's films, the characters are drained, and they're left soft and androgynous in an inviting way; Scott squashes his characters, and the dread that he sets up leads you to expect some release, and you know it's not the release you want.
All we've got to hang on to is Deckard, and the moviemakers seem to have decided that his characterization was complete when they signed Harrison Ford for the role. Deckard's bachelor pad is part of a 1924 Frank Lloyd Wright house with a Mayan motif. Apart from that, the only things we learn about him are that he has inexplicably latched on to private-eye lingo, that he was married, and that he's tired of killing replicants-it has begun to sicken him. (The piano in his apartment has dozens of family pictures on it, but they're curiously old-fashioned photos-they seem to go back to the nineteenth century -and we have no idea what happened to all those people.) The film's visual scale makes the sloppy bit of plot about Deckard going from one oddball place to another as he tracks down the four replicants-two men, two women-seem sort of pitiable But his encounters with the replicant women are sensationally, violently effective. As Zhora, who has found employment as an artificial snake charmer, Joanna Cassidy has some of the fine torrid sluttiness she had in The Late Show. (Nobody is less like a humanoid than Joanna Cassidy; her Zhora wasn't manufactured as an adult-she was formed by bitter experience, and that's what gives her a screen presence.) And, in the one really shocking and magical sequence, Daryl Hannah, as the straw haired, acrobatic Pris, does a punk variation on Olympia, the doll automaton of The Tales of Hoffmann.
The two male replicants give the movie problems. Leon (Brian James, who brings a sweaty wariness and suggestions of depth to the role) has found a factory job at the Tyrell Corporation itself, and his new employers, suspecting that he may be a renegade replicant, give him a highly sophisticated test. It checks his emotional responses by detecting the contractions of the pupils of his eyes as he attempts to deal with questions about his early life. But this replicant-detector test comes at the beginning of the picture, before we have registered that replicants have no early life. And it seems utterly pointless, since surely the Tyrell Corporation has photographic records of the models it has produced and, in fact, when the police order Deckard to find and retire the four he is shown perfectly clear pictures of them. It might have been much cannier to save any testing until later in the movie, when Deckard has doubts about a very beautiful dark eyed woman-Tyrell's assistant, Rachael, played by Sean Young. Rachael, who has the eyes of an old Murine ad, seems more of a zombie than anyone else in the movie, because the director tries to pose her the way von Sternberg posed Dietrich, but she saves Deckard's life, and even plays his piano. (She smokes, too, but then the whole atmosphere is smoking.) Rachael wears vamped-up versions of the mannish padded shoulder suits and the sleek, stiff hairdos and ultra-glossy lipstick of career girls in forties movies; her shoulder comes into a room a long time before she does. And if Deckard had felt compelled to test her responses it could have been the occasion for some nifty repartee; she might have been spirited and touching. Her role is limply written, though; she's cool at first, but she spends most of her screen time looking mysteriously afflicted-wet-eyed with yearning-and she never gets to deliver a zinger. I don't think she even has a chance to laugh. The moviemakers haven't learned that wonderful, simple trick of bringing a character close to the audience by giving him a joke or having him overreact to one. The people we're watching are so remote from us they might be shadows of people who aren't there.
The only character who gets to display a large range of emotions is the fourth of the killer replicants, and their leader-Roy Batty (the Crazed King?), played by the tall, blue-eyed blond Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, whose hair is lemon-white here. Hauer (who was Albert Speer in Inside the Third Reich on television last May) stares all the time; he also smiles ominously, hoo-hoos like a mad owl and howls like a wolf, and, at moments, appears to see himself as the god Pan, and as Christ crucified. He seems a shoo-in for this year's Klaus Kinski Scenery-Chewing Award. As a humanoid in a homicidal rage because replicants are built to last only four years, he stalks through the movie like an evil Aryan superman; he brings the wrong kind of intensity to the role-an effete, self-aware irony so overscaled it's Wagnerian. His gaga performance is an unconscious burlesque that apparently passes for great acting with the director, especially when Hauer turns noble sufferer and poses like a big hunk of sculpture. (It's a wonder he doesn't rust out in all that rain.) This sequence is particularly funny because there's poor Harrison Ford, with the fingers of one hand broken, reduced to hanging on to bits of the cornice of a tall building by his one good hand-by then you've probably forgotten that he is Harrison Ford, the fellow who charms audiences by his boundless good humor-while the saucer-eyed Hauer rants and carries on. Ford is like Harold Lloyd stuck by mistake in the climax of Duel in the Sun.
Ridley Scott may not notice that when Hauer is onscreen the camera seems stalled and time breaks down, because the whole movie gives you a feeling of not getting anywhere. Deckard's mission seems of no particular consequence. Whom is he trying to save? Those sewer-rat people in the city? They're presented as so dehumanized that their life or death hardly matters. Deckard feels no more connection with them than Ridley Scott does. They're just part of the film's bluish-gray, heavy-metal chic-inertia made glamorous. Lead zeppelins could float in this smoggy air. And maybe in the moviemakers' heads, too. Why is Deckard engaged in this urgent hunt? The replicants are due to expire anyway. All the moviemakers' thinking must have gone into the sets. Apparently, the replicants have a motive for returning to Earth: they're trying to reach Tyrell-they hope he can extend their life span. So if the police want to catch them, all they need to do is wait for them to show up at Tyrrell's place. And why hasn't Deckard, the ace blade runner, figured out that if the replicants can't have their lives extended they may want revenge for their slave existence, and that all he's doing is protecting Tyrell? You can dope out how the story might have been presented, with Deckard as the patsy who does Tyrell's dirty work; as it is, you can't clear up why Tyrell isn't better guarded-and why the movie doesn't pull the plot strands together.
Blade Runner is musty even while you're looking at it (and noting its relationship to Fritz Lang's Metropolis and to von Sternberg's lighting techniques, and maybe to Polanski's Chinatown and Fellini's Roma, and so on). There are some remarkable images-for example, when the camera plays over the iron grillwork of the famous Bradbury Building in Los Angeles the iron looks tortured into shape. These images are part of the sequences about a lonely, sickly young toy-maker, Sebastian (William Sanderson), who lives in the deserted building. Sebastian has used the same techniques employed in producing replicants to make living toy companions for himself, and since the first appearance of these toys has some charm, we wait to see them in action again. When the innocent, friendly Sebastian is in danger, we expect the toys to come to his aid or be upset or, later, try to take reprisals for what happens to their creator, or at least grieve. We assume that moviemakers wouldn't go to all the trouble of devising a whole batch of toy figures only to forget about them. But this movie loses track of the few expectations it sets up, and the formlessness adds to a viewer's demoralization-the film itself seems part of the atmosphere of decay Blade Runner has nothing to give the audience-not even a second of sorrow for Sebastian. It hasn't been thought out in human terms. If anybody comes around with a test to detect humanoids, maybe Ridley Scott and his associates should hide. With all the smoke in this movie, you feel as if everyone connected with it needs to have his flue cleaned.

The New Yorker, July 12, 1982; p. 82

Read here more reviews by Pauline Kael

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BLADE RUNNER: BABY, THE RAIN MUST FALL - Review by Pauline Kael

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by Pauline Kael Ridley Scott, the director of the futuristic thriller Blade Runner, sets up the action with a crawl announcing that the time is early in the twenty-first century, and that a blade runner is a police officer who "retires''-i.e., kills-"replicants," the powerful humanoids manufactured by genetic engineers,

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"I think, at the end of the day, filmmaking is a team, but eventually there's got to be a captain"

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Excellent academic essay.

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Written by Eli F. on October 5, 2017

As Ridley Scott lives and breathes - and lord knows he will, so long as there are more Alien prequels to be made - there is always the chance that Blade Runner: The Final Cut's title may yet become anachronistic. But for going on ten years now, the seventh distinct full-length cut of Scott's magnum opus has fulfilled its promise of being the last word on Blade Runner. Released in 2007, this version of the iconic 1982 sci-fi film mixes and matches various scenes and edits from multiple previous editions, while digitally tweaking the visual effects, colors, and audio mixing in preparation for Blade Runner's inaugural release in high-definition formats. Out of the many previous incarnations, The Final Cut most closely resembles Scott's 1992 Director's Cut, with some subtle but noteworthy modifications.

Though the film is based on Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and adapted by screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples (the former of whom co-wrote the Denis Villeneuve-directed Blade Runner 2049, out this weekend), Ridley Scott has been very particular in claiming and exercising ownership over the film in the 35 years since its release. It is interesting to note that Scott, in his many revisits of Blade Runner, appears to share much of George Lucas's philosophical approach to editing and digital technologies - that a film is less solid object than fluid canvas, an ongoing work subject to the auteur's evolving whims and the advancing technological means by which he may choose to implement them. Yet Scott has not faced nearly the same level of popular backlash in the face of such a revisionist approach to his own work. He seems to realize, perhaps only too keenly, that Blade Runner is unquestionably his masterpiece - the greatest piece of cinema he has ever or will ever make. And, like Lucas, perhaps his role is best described not as "director," but "architect."

Blade Runner 's great accomplishment is the creation of a world. Before a single line of dialogue is spoken, before any image is seen, and even before an individual name is assigned to any character, the film dramatically announces its subject and its heart at the conclusion of the opening titles: LOS ANGELES, 2019. Every subsequent frame is an exotic tapestry of light, shadow, metal, and stone so inconceivably dense in composition as to defy comprehension at a glance from the eyes of ordinary, organically grown humans. It exists outside of time and space: people and places, hairstyles, music, and towering, brand-name holograms are unmistakable products of the 1980s yet simultaneously alien and distant, a few steps removed from recognizable history - Replicants of our world. Human figures (and tragically humanoid imitations) may wander the overcast streets of "LOS ANGELES, 2019," but it is the city itself -wrathful, melancholy, violent and weeping - that consumes the experience. Likewise, the classically terse noir plot that creates structure is ultimately a mere skeleton for something more mystical, eerie, and transcendental.

Perhaps Scott's "Final Cut," then, was made with a sensitivity to aesthetic pleasures and emotional highlights brought about by decades of hindsight. For one thing, the very medium of high-definition home video does considerable good for the film. This is a work that simply is not experienced in a single viewing, but in multiple returns to its ambiguous world; to not be able to watch it over and over again on home media is just not enough. To not experience its overwhelming compositions in high definition is also insufficient - indeed, one can almost see why Blade Runner was not as appreciated by audiences and critics in its time as it is now.

But it is Scott's obsessive personal touches that provoke, frustrate, and delight. With every subsequent edition under his purview he has accentuated the heart of his own vision for the material, sometimes to the exclusion of other interpretations. The original 1982 cut, which Scott emphatically denounced as quickly as he was able, contains a pulpy first-person voiceover from Harrison Ford's Deckard. Many argue that the voiceover, in theory if not in practice, has been unfairly maligned by Scott and Ford: it lends the film a remarkably different cadence and provides a much clearer, more relatable, and more defined emotional center. By granting us access to his inner thoughts and deadpan observations, the outwardly inexpressive Deckard changes from cryptic cipher to likable hero, bringing the script's abstract emotional stakes down to earth and morphing the entire film around him in turn, as well as cementing Blade Runner 's lineage in the tradition of classic LA detective fiction. For better or worse, Scott's subsequent editing (beginning with his wholesale elimination of the narration itself) has studiously called the audience's attention away from Deckard and onto the eerie silences and dirty, empty spaces that populate his world. The film's original score by Vangelis, a techno-operatic phantasmagoria from an artist inextricably tied to the sound of the '80s, was always a heavy driving narrative force in the film. But more and more frequently it carries entire scenes almost singlehandedly, punctuated by only the barest minimum of ambient noise, let alone dialogue. Scott wants the marvelous places and their dark, wondrous ambiance to dictate the audience's dreamlike engagement with LA, 2019 - the humanoid avatars of plot mere receptacles for an overflowing abundance of mood.

If there's one foundational brick that Scott the architect has never perfectly been able to balance, it is the film's ending. The theatrical cut's, imposed by Warner Bros. studio executives against the director's will, is famously jarring: having completed his mission, Deckard spirits his fugitive Replicant lover Rachael out of the dark and smog-choked Los Angeles, emerging into a brilliant, verdant countryside where they drive into a seemingly endless expanse of empty, mountainous roads; Vangelis's grand, ominous end credits theme fades in over sweeping aerial pans recycled from WB's vault of unused location shots from The Shining. Scott regards this ending as a grotesque added appendage hacked and sewn onto the rest of his picture; yet despite its lack of logical coherency, the stark change of visual tones and scenery does create an oddly powerful, dreamlike catharsis, a redemptive yet eerily surreal final note accentuated by a soundtrack that seems clearly written for this imagery. (The climactic emergence of characters from metropolitan dystopia to unspoiled, uninhabited countryside is a visual motif that has since been recreated in other cyberpunk-influenced media, for instance Hayao Miyazaki's underappreciated music video On Your Mark, undoubtedly a direct result of viewers who never imagined the film was meant to conclude any other way.) In lieu of this ending, his preferred cuts conclude with something of an anticlimax: preparing to go on the run with Rachael, Deckard flees from his apartment, slamming the doors behind him, as the film cuts to black. It's an abrupt and strangely claustrophobic final image for a great film whose spiritual bedrock lies in complex and evocative structures of space; perhaps old Mr. Scott will give it one more touch-up the next time around.

See More: Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Ridley Scott, The Best Films of 2007

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'Blade Runner' and the Fluid Canvas of Ridley Scott's Sci-Fi Masterpiece

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Written by Eli F. on October 5, 2017 As Ridley Scott lives and breathes - and lord knows he will, so long as there are more Alien prequels to be made - there is always the chance that Blade Runner: The Final Cut's title may yet become anachronistic.

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Overview of Scott's filmography & directorial approach/key tropes.

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Retrospective: The Films Of Ridley Scott

So not only has Ridley Scott apparently delivered his best-or certainly most enjoyable- film in years according to reviews ( ours included) of this past Friday's "The Martian," he's also apparently way ahead of the news cycle. The director says he knew about water on Mars well in advance of NASA's recent announcement. That Earth shaking reveal yesterday may simply be a coincidence, or it may be a canny mutually-bolstering ploy that gives his film a boost, which in turn will expose more people to its pro-NASA message. Or there's a third possibility: Ridley Scott may actually be the Godlike being his fans have long suspected.
If there's a case to be made for Scott's cinematic deification, "" and "Blade Runner" and quite a few others would probably figure largely as such. However, there's plenty of evidence that he has feet of clay -his run over the last few years alone has ranged from the forgettable to the unforgivably dull to the outrageously off-the-chain and possibly cult-inspiring. Which means Scott's filmography encompasses every type of success in almost every genre, as well as failures of every conceivable stripe. It makes for one of the most eclectic, erratic filmographies we can imagine, yet one that is united by his distinct style and approach. So, we've decided to take a look through the many peaks and multiple troughs of Ridley Scott's filmography to date.

"The Duellists" (1977)
Scott's first feature, which won him the Camera d'Or at Cannes, feels quite different from anything else that followed: a stripped-down, vaguely allegorical tale adapted from Joseph Conrad's short story " The Duel." It follows the decades-long feud between two French soldiers, D'Hubert ( Keith Carradine) and Feraud ( Harvey Keitel), as they find themselves continually clashing swords after Feraud takes insult at a perceived slight to his honor. It's sumptuous and detailed enough to suggest that Scott arrived on the scene as a fully formed visual stylist (even if it's clearly indebted to " Barry Lyndon," as Scott himself has subsequently admitted) and it's relatively lean and compelling, at least when it's not pursuing redundant romantic sub-plots. But Carradine and Keitel are both woefully, bafflingly miscast -particularly when put up against the supporting cast, which includes Albert Finney, Edward Fox, Robert Stephens and Diana Quick - and never integrate at all into the lavishly imagined world that Scott is trying to render. Still, it's a fascinating oddity in the director's canon. [B-]

"Alien" (1979)
As different as possible from his first film, Scott's unimpeachable sci-fi horror is an exercise in minimalist terror, manifesting in the most unknowable, terrifying extraterrestrial creature ever seen onscreen. Now that it's part of film history, having spawned sequels great and terrible, has crossbred with other franchises to produce new hybrid film series, and in general has become lodged deep in the cultural consciousness of the past few decades, it's hard to realize how surprising "Alien" must have been at the time. But just cast your mind back and try to imagine sitting down in the theater, not knowing that Sigourney Weaver would turn out to be the lead, or what happens in that dinner scene, or how little to trust the robot Kane ( Ian Holm) or just how insanely chilling those snatched glimpses at HR Giger's creature would turn out to be. Yet the now-infamous last voyage of the Nostromo has weathered years of homages, rip-offs and sequels and kinda-sorta prequels, and still retains a large part of its impact. That is all down to the striking economy and confidence of Scott's filmmaking. No matter how many " Prometheus "s he lumbers us with afterward, Scott will never tarnish the legacy of this piece of pared-back perfection. [A+]
READ MORE: Ridley Scott Says 'Prometheus 3' Or 'Prometheus 4' Will Finally Connect With 'Alien'
"Blade Runner" (1982)
We've said it before, and now here we go again: If anyone can make a go of the "Blade Runner" sequel, it's probably Denis Villeneuve (especially in collaboration with DP Roger Deakins). But despite our oceanic goodwill, there's still only the slimmest of outside chances that his film can possibly stack up next to the original, simply because the original is one of the greatest films of all time, in one of the trickiest but most provocative and exciting of genres. Of course, it flopped on release. Still, "Blade Runner," based on a Philip K. Dick short story, has proven a massive influence on virtually every sci-fi movie, videogame and comic book since, and remains one of the most complete, coherent visions of a dystopian future ever put on screen. Whichever version of the film you watch -the pulpy Philip Marlowe-y original with the explanatory voiceover and the happy ending, or the existentially introspective director's cut which of course suggests Harrison Ford 's Deckard is a replicant- you walk away after the credits feeling like you've lived a whole life in an alternate, broken 2019 Los Angeles and, despite the bleak rain-soaked atmosphere, you'd go back again in a heartbeat. It's not just an exercise in world-creation; the noirish plot is gripping, the performances are uniformly outstanding, and the moral concerning the value of life and the nature of humanity is profoundly beautiful and curious in a way that maybe only the greatest science fiction can be. [A+]

"Legend" (1985)
It's easy to forget that, for years before " The Lord of the Rings" movies came along to give the genre a good name, cornball fare like "Legend" defined the fantasy film. But as dated and often cheesy as Scott's sole attempt at the genre can feel these days, the picture does get a few things right, especially on the soundtrack with a dreamy score by Tangerine Dream and a wonderfully romantic closing number by sharp dressed Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry. Elsewhere, your mileage on this one will definitely vary, based on your level of nostalgia, how swoonsome you find a youthful gold-clad Tom Cruise making doe eyes at '80s hottie Mia Sara and your tolerance for camerawork so gauzy it's a little like you're watching the whole thing through a chiffon veil. It's basically the filmic equivalent of new-age unicorn art, though with a surprising (or not so much considering the director's other output) dark streak that threatens to make it all a bit sludgy where it's clearly supposed to be elfin and fairylike and full of magick that you spell with a "k." Even those predisposed by childhood memories to love "Legend" have to admit that it has not weathered the intervening years well. And considering how timeless Scott's previous two films feel now and how otherworldly and outside-of-history this one should be, that's all the more disappointing. [C+]

"Someone to Watch Over Me" (1987)
While few of his features to date have betrayed any real sense of Scott's genesis as a filmmaker in the world of advertising, 1987's "Someone to Watch Over Me" seems to zero in squarely on territory occupied by fellow commercial alum Adrian Lyne -that of the "erotic thriller." Neither particualrly erotic nor hugely thrilling to the modern eye perhaps, the film, telling the tale of a cop ( Tom Berenger) assigned to protect a murder witness (Mimi Rogers), yields some real pleasure in showing Scott treating upper class socialite Manhattan as just as otherworldly as the LA of "Blade Runner" (he even borrowed some of Vangelis' score). But as critics even noted at the time, Berenger and Mimi Rogers have little chemistry, and the working-class tough-guy falling for his high-class social superior storyline feels pretty rote and heavyhanded, especially considering the murder subplot is so tepid. Lorraine Bracco as Berenger's brassy, down-to-earth wife is terrific, finding surprising truth in a smallish role despite the cliche script, but even she, and the lavish '80s music video aesthetic can't rid "Someone to Watch Over Me" of the feel of a movie you've seen a dozen times before and a dozen times since. It's one of Scott's rarer and less forgivable missteps: an unoriginal one. [C]

"Black Rain" (1989)
For a man responsible for more than a few bona fide classics, Scott was almost always only one or two pictures away from something far more anonymous after his unassailable early run . Occasionally, courtesy of "Someone to Watch Over Me" and this fluffy-haired Michael Douglas and floppy-haired Andy Garcia vehicle, he could even come across as a copycat journeyman (albeit a slick one), rather than the original auteur he proved himself elsewhere -sometimes the films he copied included his own. And so the design of "Black Rain" is full of the slatted blinds and lazy ceiling fans of "Blade Runner" with none of the actual noir texture, though Hans Zimmer 's percussion-heavy, guitar-wailing theme is pretty rad, to use the parlance of the time. The rest of the film is a serviceable B-movie about no-bullshit New York cops getting mixed up in a Japanese crime investigation before shit gets personal -at the time it felt like a throwback to the decade it was actually made in. Still, it's definitely pacy (again powered along by Zimmer's score), and only slightly cringey in its East-West politics, especially if you continually remind yourself "this was the '80s." Which, frankly, Douglas' hair does a pretty good job of. [B-]

"Thelma & Louise" (1991)
Made two and half decades ago, it's clear that "Thelma and Louise" did not radically remake the filmmaking landscape in its feminist image, as some contemporary commentators suggested it might. But to watch it again is to wonder (again) why the hell it didn't: "Thelma and Louise" is an absolutely cracking movie: it's beautifully shot, briskly paced (even at 129 minutes) and peerlessly acted by a dream cast, particularly Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis rustling up effortless chemistry as the titular duo. Callie Khouri's outstanding script has a lot to do with it, and the film's eventual popularity was further fuelled by the "discovery" of smirking golden boy Brad Pitt in an iconic eye-candy role, but we can't take away from Scott's impassioned direction, which does a remarkable, near-unprecedented thing: it makes a female friendship not just warm, loving, mutually supportive and important, but makes it cool. Also featuring a lovely supporting turn from Harvey Keitel as the decent lawman tasked against his inclination with chasing down the outlaws, and building to one of the most fabulously happy/sad endings in '90s Hollywood cinema, the fact that the film did not turn out to push the vanguard of a female-oriented movie revolution forward only enhances its uniqueness and value today. [A]
READ MORE: Watch: Ridley Scott & Hans Zimmer Talk Collaboration on 'Thelma & Louise' In Vintage Interview
"1492: Conquest of Paradise" (1992)
After the genre exercise of "Black Rain" and the aforementioned "Thelma & Louise" (arguably his most successfully "grounded" picture - i.e. one not set in a dystopian future or a long-distant past or an unreal alternate reality), Scott attempted a return to spectacle, but this time on an epic scale with "1492: Conquest of Paradise." The ingredients were all present and correct: an international cast led by recently Oscar-nominated Gerard Depardieu, lavish production design and costuming, and a bloated eventual runtime of 142 minutes. But the result was rather scuppered (!) by a Weighty Sense of Importance (the film was designed to be be a kind of definitive celebration of the problematic Columbus "discovering America" story, released exactly 500 years after he landed), and even the seeming home-run elements didn't quite work. Depardieu, wonderful in his native French films and blessed with the kind of imposing charisma that should have suited the part to a T, seems lost and uncomfortable here in his Awkward English dialogue, and the grandeur of the setting and locations just seems to drag the pacing down to a slow crawl. Scott did manage some of his trademark razzle-dazzle at times, but surface was never the problem here -it lacks substance, and unsurprisingly sank like a stone at the box office. [C]

"White Squall" (1996)
What should be a thrilling, white-knuckle ride becomes a perfect storm of forgettability (and yes, that's a reference to the much more memorable " A Perfect Storm" from Wolfgang Petersen that would come along four years later) as Scott headed out to sea for his second waterlogged box-office bomb on the trot. The based-in-fact tale follows a group of 1960s high school boys (including Scott Wolf, Ryan Phillippe, Balthazar Getty and Jeremy Sisto) taken out to sea by their schoolmaster and skipper ( Jeff Bridges), when the titular violent windstorm hits and threatens to sink the boat. There's a great deal of impressive, lived-in detail, a fair amount of hard-won sailing-is-life wisdom, and Bridges delivers a typically strong, understated performance. But Todd Robinson 's script leans too heavily on coming-of-age cliches between the young guys whose problems all feel lifted directly from the Inspiration Teacher movie handbook, and so while the storm footage is as impressive as you could wish for, everything leading up to it feels pretty familiar, not too engaging and frankly a little dull. [C]

"G.I. Jane" (1997)
People really hate this movie. But while as a feminist manifesto, it has none of the zip and effortless-seeming chemistry that made "Thelma & Louise" such a instantly irresistible hit, "G.I. Jane" is at least a failure that's trying to do something interesting. The wafer thin script by David Twohy probably doesn't help, though he does give Viggo Mortensen's ruthless drill sergeant a DH Lawrence poem to recite, so there's that -there's very little plot here and the characterization does not feel strong enough to make it a character portrait either. But still, Demi Moore, shaved head and rock hard, pumped physique gives her all in an impressively muscular performance (literally and figuratively), and while the tone can feel oppressively grim if you're not on its wavelength, that's also an admirable stylistic choice for a Hollywood movie starring one of the biggest female stars of the time. It's by no means a home run, but as a lean and unsentimental look at SEAL training and sexism in the military -where physical endurance and strength often is the battleground for women attempting to prove themselves- it's a bit like a training montage from another film stretched out to feature length, with the upbeat Survivor track removed, but not necessarily in a bad way. [C+/B-]

"Gladiator" (2000)
...aaand... as much as people hate "GI Jane" and we don't, people really love "Gladiator," and again we're a little out of step. It's certainly not bad by any stretch of the imagination, yet it's still hard for us to get our heads around just what a phenomenon this film became back in 2000: the film was a box office sensation, a career-making vehicle for Russell Crowe who'd been knocking on superstardom's door since " LA Confidential,' and a five-time Oscar winner, including that year's Best Picture and Best Actor statues. To be sure, it's an impressive and accomplished piece of entertainment, but the film is also a little self-consciously grandiose for what is really a decent, old-fashioned swords-and-sandals yarn. Still, the production design is again outstanding, especially the fairly seamless CG recreations of the Colosseum and also of parts of the late Oliver Reed's last performance, as he died before shooting had finished. Joaquin Phoenix (also Oscar-nominated) made an appropriately sneery villain in real-life baddie Emperor Commodus, and Crowe gives fictional hero Maximus the kind of tectonic presence that suggests, even if it's not his greatest performance, that it may well always be the one that defines him. [B]

"Hannibal" (2001)
One of the many good things about the TV show " Hannibal" is that it has reclaimed the name of one of fiction's most indelibly fascinating villains from this desperately subpar entry in the cinematic franchise kicked off by Jonathan Demme's brilliant " The Silence of the Lambs." Of course, it's hard to tell how much of the resultant mess was really Scott's fault: the "Lambs" sequel was supposed to be a reunion of Demme, Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster in the roles they'd all won Oscars for last time at bat. Instead, that fell apart and Scott stepped into the breach with Julianne Moore as Clarice at a later stage, so that only Hopkins remained of the original team. However, it was under Scott's tutelage that Hopkins, so chillingly restrained in 'Lambs,' hammed it up outrageously, making the titular cannibal just one of the film's roster of outsized freakshow inhabitants, including a (smartly) uncredited Gary Oldman cutting off his own face and talking about drinking orphan's tears and a bored Ray Liotta eating his own brain. That's right: this is a film in which Ray Liotta can eat his own brain and bore everyone, even himself, while doing so. [D-]

"Black Hawk Down" (2001)
This is not the film of Scott's to show to anyone who's in the habit of accusing him of being nothing more than a technician -he's made soulful, textured, layered movies, but this is not one of them. But "Black Hawk Down" is a stunningly well-shot, pared-back exercise in war-movie-as-pure-cinema: an almost avant garde experiment in how to use scintillating photography ( by Krzysztof Kieslowski collaborator Slawomir Idziak and lethally precise editing (by Pietro Scalia) to create a sense of incredible tension and immediacy. So it's more as an aesthetic marvel that the film works at all -the deceptive docudrama elements are underserved by a script that scarcely allows us to tell one actor from another, despite the stacked cast full of recognisable faces ( Eric Bana probably fares best in terms of actually making an individual impression). The film's geography is disorienting, the goals are not always clear and we're not sure if it's the gung-ho politics of the film that are offputting or the fact it doesn't really seem to have any politics at all but merely uses the Mogadishu setting as the excuse for a extended tension set-piece. But as a grunt's-eye view of the confusion and panic of on-the-ground combat that has little truck with human characters or emotional connection, it's a taut and bruising experience. [B-]

"Matchstick Men" (2003)
Nicolas Cage undoubtedly went off the boil in the late 90s and experienced a dry spell (or rather one that involved lots of mad-eyed ranting and a memorable encounter with some bees) that lasted most of the aughts too. But there was a noticeable uptick in the middle of the wilderness period: after his brilliant turn in Charlie Kaufman-scripted, Spike Jonze-directed " Adaptation," Cage showed up in Scott's highly entertaining "Matchstick Men." Probably the most underrated film in the director's canon, it's also overlooked for the actor's great performance. It's a sharp, fast and engaging con man/father-daughter tale, with the Cage's mannered and manic character, hounded by phobias, struggling throughout in the throes of a wonderfully nuanced inner conflict-his empathy for his newfound daughter is fundamentally at odds with his inherent neuroticism and his fierce cunning. Sam Rockwell is aces as usual in support, and Alison Lohman has never been able to top her stellar role here. The contrivance at the end does sell the great work to that point short and makes the picture feel a little slight, but for most of its 116 minutes, it's a blast.[B]
READ MORE: Nicolas Cage Chooses His Favorite Movie Roles, Weighs In On State Of Film Criticism
"Kingdom of Heaven" (2005)
You may think you've seen, and been disappointed by "Kingdom of Heaven," but you haven't had the full experience of just how tedious it can be until you get into the protracted director's cut-the one that many, including Scott himself touted as the redemption of this yawn of a Crusades "epic". Yes, the extra 45 minutes restores entire plotlines and gives the film room to breathe, but it also just makes the slog of an experience (who cares if gaps are filled if the filler is so inherently dull?) even longer. Yes, Edward Norton courageously plays his non-existent character behind a mask the entire length of the picture... erm, congratulations? Hopefully one day we'll see a Final Cut with Orlando Bloom's performance digitally removed and replaced by Paul Bettany, Scott's first choice for the part; there's a reason that Bloom hasn't toplined too many blockbusters since. Deeply flawed, it's like the more solemn, vastly less entertaining version of "Gladiator," only this time it goes full-bore with the faith subplot that is so shallowly rendered it shows up just how empty the entire endeavor is. Original version [D], Director's Cut [C-]

"A Good Year" (2006)
This 2006 picture is one of Scott's most fascinating failures, if only because it seems to swim against the tide of his basic intuition and the very fiber of his nature. Putatively a romantic comedy, it is actually more of a character study about a tried-and-true asshole (Russell Crowe's British investment broker) who eventually discovers he has a soul when he inherits his uncle's French chateau and vineyard-the very place where he spent his childhood and a locale that contains his most cherished memories. The movie is a complete 180 from everything the filmmaker has ever made because, for once, he shies away from genre and spectacle and digs around for some true humanity. So on paper, we ideologically love this film and for its first hour or so it almost is the film we'd hope for, in which we get to see Scott attempting something different and succeeding. But then comes the second half and the film lapses into woefully pedestrian cliches, and by the third act when the immensely unconvincing romance between Crowe and a thinly drawn Marion Cotillard, comes to the fore, you can't avoid noticing how superficial it all is. Extra demerits for managing to waste such talented actresses as Cotillard and Abbie Cornish too. [C]

"American Gangster" (2007)
If there's one perplexing habit that Scott has developed late in his career and we'd like him to please stop, it's taking fundamentally interesting stories and characters, and then making a film about them before they become that interesting (hello, " Robin Hood," goodbye, "Robin Hood"). And "American Gangster" is really Exhibit A here: originally a sort of dual-identities experiment about how the cat and mouse can sometimes have more in common than they want to think, somehow it morphed into a rather unsatisfying origin story. So the film ends just when it's getting good: with a post-script informing us of the unusual working relationship between the two main characters cocaine "entrepreneur" Frank Lucas ( Denzel Washington) and dogged city cop Ritchie Roberts ( Russell Crowe). Who cares about the familiar rise-and-fall beats of Lucas' back story, or the broken homelife subplots paralleled by both men? We want to see the film where his nemesis Roberts starts to defend Lucas, fighting to shortening his sentence-the film that happens, sadly, after the credits roll. [B-]

"Body of Lies" (2008)
It's not that "Body of Lies" is bad - it's just that it should be so much better. A spy movie that's depressingly short on political intrigue, it still has a lot going for it in one of Russell Crowe's most understated performances since " The Insider" (and by now he'd settled nicely into the schlubby everyman phase of his career as opposed to the growling god of " Gladiator"), and one of more convincingly grown-up Leonardo DiCaprio turns from this era too. The story, detailing a CIA operative who uncovers a lead on a major terrorist leader suspected to be operating out of Jordan is just a little rote, but it does give Crowe the chance to subvert his tough guy, alpha male persona and gave good supporting roles to ever reliable Mark Strong and pre-big-time Oscar Isaac as well. Scott would bring them both back for his next picture, but while that film would turn out to be probably the most turgid of his entire career, this one remains fairly entertaining if insignificant, and probably quite a bit better than its posthumous reputation suggests. [B-]

"Robin Hood" (2010)
As one of the most frequently filmed tales in cinema history, how would Scott, reuniting with Russell Crowe once again, find a fresh spin on "Robin Hood"? Hey guys, I know! Let's 1) make it a prequel and 2) make it incredibly boring! Assuming we were ever interested in what happened to legendary folk hero Robin Hood before he became interesting, Scott's version adds insult to injury by not only stripping out all that extraneous robs-from-the-rich-and-gives-to-the-poor stuff, but by replacing it with a Tea Party-style message about how unfair it is that millionaire Ridley Scott has to pay his taxes or something. The "Gladiator"-style action suffers from a severe case of diminishing returns, and the performances, even from greats like Cate Blanchett, Mark Strong and William Hurt, are flat and tedious, saved only by the sneeringly entertaining Oscar Isaac as Prince John. Perhaps Scott, sick of the ceaseless summation of "Kingdom of Heaven" as his worst film decided to make a worse one to teach us all. He succeeded. [D-]

"Prometheus" (2012)
"Robin Hood" was rubbish, but Scott's next film, "Prometheus" was heartbreaking. It should have gone so differently, and really looked like it would for while: the return to the "Alien" universe that Scott had spawned over three decades before was populated with a to-die-for cast including Michael Fassbender (who plays a robot but gives the absolute best and most human performance in the film), Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Noomi Rapace, Idris Elba, Logan Marshall-Green and more, and was teased with a genuinely great trailer (remember how much we all loved that goddamn trailer?). But when the film itself finally rolled into cinemas like big rolly wheel thing that Theron does not think to step out of the way of, it crushed our hopes flat. It may not be out-and-out bad, it may even have sequences (anything with Fassbender; the self-surgery bit) that are kind of great, but the whole falls so far short of the original film's greatness that it's no wonder everyone involved spent so much time distancing the two. Needlessly overcomplicating and confusedly overexplaining a mythology whose essence, certainly back when Scott was last at the helm for it, was its implacable, elegant simplicity, "Prometheus" essentially did for the "Alien" universe what Midichlorians did for The Force. [C-]

In case the passage of time has mellowed your WTF?! reaction to this much-vaunted Cormac McCarthy-scripted hot mess, so let one who came to the film for the first time just recently remind you: holy shit. Having read and enjoyed the script, and knowing the cast (well certainly Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Brad Pitt) are all ringers, the only person to really blame for just how very bad a film this is, is Ridley Scott. Perhaps suffering from unusual reverence (Scott had been trying manfully to adapt McCarthy's " Blood Meridian" prior), it feels like Scott barely has the tiger (or perhaps the twin leopards) of McCarthy's screenplay by the tail. The mechanical plot is incomprehensible, and the characterization almost non-existent: there's a lot of speechifying, much of which is deliriously McCarthyish in its parboiled, misanthropic, self-interested philosophy, but everyone sounds the same and while we watch the unnamed lawyer see greed essentially dismantle his life, we're never given a single reason to care. In fact, it'd be a complete dud, but to be fair, some of the monologues, and the more outre moments, such as the fabulously gory violence (Pitt's death scene is awesome) and the already infamous Cameron Diaz-humping-a-Ferrari-windshield bit make it a fascinatingly tacky and tasteless one, which kind of drags it up a notch. Call it Ridley Scott's " The Paperboy." [C-]
READ MORE: Ridley Scott Says He Prefers Director's Cut Of 'The Counselor,' Mocks Fox Studio's Prudishness
"Exodus: Gods and Kings" (2014)
Exotically, extravagantly bad though "The Counselor" was, we'd probably take it over the exotic, extravagant would-be epic that followed: "Exodus: Gods and Kings" is worse than Scott in a tailspin: it's Scott on autopilot. Somehow sapping the dynamism from a story that features a whole ten plagues and a rather famous moment involving the Red Sea, 'Exodus' dull script, Scott's CG-heavy execution and Christian Bale's dull-as-paint Moses make this Biblical disaster film both overblown and undernourished. In fact, the whole endeavor works best as a companion piece to make us appreciate just what an interesting weird job Darren Aronofsky did with "Noah." Anyway, we digress, which is easy to do when trying to think about 'Exodus,' which the mind just slides off, only really snagging on Joel Edgerton's laudably committed turn as Ramses. Even clad in the most outrageous of outfits and slathered in tangerine tan, Edgerton manages to create some believeable moments, but not enough to save 'Exodus' whose few redeeming features (Edgerton; Ben Mendelsohn; a few semi-interesting moments in which ancient politics take on topical relevance) are mostly washed away by crashed waves of boredom by the end. [C-]
"The Martian" opens this week, while the astonishingly busy Scott has the - Jessica Kiang, Oli Lyttelton, Rodrigo Perez & Kevin Jagernauth confusingly titled "Prometheus" sequel "Alien: Paradise Lost" lined up to direct afterward (with duly lowered expectations), and about 400 other potential projects on his upcoming production schedule.
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Retrospective: The Films Of Ridley Scott

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Retrospective: The Films Of Ridley Scott So not only has Ridley Scott apparently delivered his best-or certainly most enjoyable- film in years according to reviews ( ours included) of this past Friday's "The Martian," he's also apparently way ahead of the news cycle.

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Useful academic video discussing Vertigo.

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Close-Up: Rewatching film classics - Vertigo, 1958

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Considers why Vertigo voted best film of all time with analysis of key themes.

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Hypnotised and hypnotic, mad and maddening, surely no commercial studio film (admittedly, a commercial and critical flop on its release) has ever offered and withheld such intricacy of intent and interpretation as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Pored over, parsed for clues, yanked to and fro by academics and psychoanalysts, its spirals of meaning permeate the development of film theory like the ringbound spine of a syllabus folder.

Last week, with the weight of Magna Carta, the BFI proclaimed Hitchcock's 46th feature the greatest film ever made, displacing Citizen Kane's 50-year reign at the top. Claiming the summit can of course only be a bad thing for Vertigo, marking the moment it stops being a singular work of unsettling depth and power, and becomes homework.

The preposterous story is that of Scottie (James Stewart), a detective who develops a fear of heights after watching a colleague fall to his death. During his recovery, Scottie is approached by old pal Elster (Tom Helmore), who confides that his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), has been possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, a suicidal 18th-century aristocrat. Sceptical Scottie agrees to follow Madeleine and after intervening in her attempted suicide, inevitably falls in love. However, an attack of vertigo renders Scottie incapable of preventing her death, which mentally breaks him. A year later, a depressed and guilt-ridden Scottie happens upon Judy, a young woman who bears a striking resemblance to Madeleine. The two tentatively begin to date, yet unable to relinquish his deepening obsession and despite her protestations, he alters her hair, makeup and clothes and forcibly transforms Judy into Madeleine.

The story's formula, a twist on Hollywood staple, was ironically summed up by Hitchcock as "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again, boy loses girl again". Yet readings of the film are ever more complex. Desire and artificiality are the film's central concerns, but ideas on subjectivity, female objectification and the male gaze frequently ballast themselves by looking into its Rorschach eye. For every theory though, there is a counter theory grounded in the same facts, the same landscape viewed in different moods. Ultimately the beauty of Vertigo cannot be so captured and pinned; it is more akin to the butterfly garden, in which we all wave our own nets. Everyone's catch will be different, and different each time.

Many agree it is Hitchcock's most effective and personal commentary on his medium, the spell of cinema and his role in it. Scottie's moulding of Judy imitates Hitchcock's own sadistic treatment of actors, directly mirroring his trademark production of fetishised cool blondes. Kim Novak has spoken of what she saw in the script, an analogue of the Hollywood star system in which she was a property. As for Jimmy Stewart, much has been made of his work here, as the increasingly morbid, sweaty, damaged policeman. To my mind he's not so much playing against type as investigating the dark obverse of his trademark screen presence: boyishness grown into emotional immaturity, his simple idealism now pointing the wrong way.

I don't particularly care for the film's moments of laboured symbolism - Saul Bass's spirograph credits for instance, or the celebrated nightmare sequence. I don't care about San Francisco or what it means. Some may think this heresy, but I find some of Hitchcock's technical showboating - dolly zooms et al - distracting. However, the less pyrotechnic side of Hitchcock's technique is a revelation. Watch the extended, silent sequence of Scottie tailing Madeleine. The camera floats, as does the pale car on its numinous pilgrimage. Scottie himself has become a ghost, or an Orpheus descending into the underworld for his love, to the places he will return in grief.

The sense of time throughout drifts in and then away from the narrative. While the film is too long, I am still in thrall to its loops and perversities, drawn inexorably into its coils. I always fall a little in love with modern, independent Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), zesty counterpoint to Madeleine's doomy beauty. She could be the light relief, but Hitch won't have it. When she impishly paints herself into a portrait of Carlotta, puncturing Scottie's overwrought fixation, it's charming, no question. Yet somehow at the end of the scene, we and Scottie abandon her and she breaks down. So many of Midge's scenes end in isolation and pain, illustrative of the film's emotional palette - not Technicolor but chiaroscuro.

The film's empathy for its troubled women reaches apotheosis in the astonishing moment when anguished Judy lets us into her secret. After Scottie leaves her apartment, Hitchcock boldly frames the back of her head, to fully draw out her slow turn and that look: directly down the camera lens, freezing us in a broken fourth wall moment before the screen turns red. In a movie containing more money shots than a Lehman Brothers documentary, it's the one that never fails to curdle my blood. Although this is the big reveal, we're given it with another third of the film's playing time remaining. As the excruciating story plays out, we're forced to identify with Judy's impossible position and follow her down the awful road to death. Every time Novak's eyes slide away from the scene she's in and into ours we feel her accusation, our voyeurism.

There are other layers I find less easy to set down or untangle, such as the film's throbbing, thanatotic drive, its principals' search for the grave. The film is obsessed by the grip of the past on our unconscious, dark tendrils that snake down through centuries, the curse of ancestral hurts. I'm disturbed by the allure of its doomed women, even the ones we don't meet: the real Madeleine and Carlotta. Elster and Hitchcock's story isn't real or even fictionally plausible, but something about it runs deeper than the excuse for a satisfying ghost story. We scarcely notice that the villain gets off scot free, because the murder is not the mystery.

The trouble with being on top of the heap is that people can shoot at you from all sides. There's no film like Vertigo, and now - officially! - no film as good. Such a heavy garland will draw flocks of naysayers with their own arguments. But all great art has within it some irreducible, inexplicable element, beyond its cleverness and craft. Such is the hold Vertigo has. This strange, frustrating story of a haunted pervert, Hitchcock's Byronic opus, still evades capture, and refuses to be something it's not.
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Hypnotised and hypnotic, mad and maddening, surely no commercial studio film (admittedly, a commercial and critical flop on its release) has ever offered and withheld such intricacy of intent and interpretation as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.