Best climax in a Hitchcock film?

Yeah, those two both contain a great climax. They are great films as well. Both of them are in my top 5 Hitchcock films. Vertigo is my favourite out of all his films, and it's in my top ten favourite films of all time.

I'm with you. I was stretching my incredulity at the storm drain, where Bruno could barely reach it 2 feet down and then did reach it 4 feet down. The scene added to the drama with a bit of a fakeout, so I was OK with it. But it had me on guard for unreasonableness.

And then came the carousel scene. A cop randomly firing into the crowd to stop a man from getting on a merry-go-round? Then hitting the operator, who falls on the switch, who makes it go impossibly fast, which causes it to collapse ... I was laughing, which was probably not the reaction Hitchcock was going for. Even Throw Momma From The Train had a more serious climax.

I think the film is praiseworthy for the basic script, and the build to the end had a lot of good elements. But the climax itself? Silly.

Currently we have cops shooting fleeing suspects in the back and planting evidence and getting away with it. So some dumb cop takes a pop at a perp in a crowd, what's so surprising?

I'm not a woman much less Deanna Durbin, but the old-time glam-shot appeals to me.

Vertigo's the best. Hitchcock wanted a different ending for "Suspicion " but was overruled. In "Vertigo" he had the clout to get the ending he wanted.




Absurdity: A Statement or belief inconsistent with my opinion.

"He flashes his camera temporarily blinding him. It was clever and intense!"

It was dumb.

Its one of them.

Here is something to remember:

Hitchcock had a "male menopausal period" after Notorious(1946.) The Paradine Case, Rope, Under Capricorn and Stage Fright were all considered rather on the static and boring side -- except that Rope opened with a grisly murder and focused on the "stunt" of "no cuts, continual single takes."

As the 50's got under way, Hitchcock was looking for a comeback movie and a way to "greet a new decade." The result was Strangers on a Train, which was his biggest hit in years and which ...by Hitchcock's own design ...needed and got a spectacular action climax after five movies(INCLUDING Notorious) which ended pretty quietly.

In short...Hitchcock was perhaps a little less than serious when he put that carousel climax into Strangers on a Train(its not in the novel)...but he wanted to get a big audience, a hit, a profit.

He would do this again 8 years later.

With The Wrong Man and Vertigo having been dour, dramatic, and (in one case) tragic films, Hitchcock needed a big box office hit, and he devised one: North by Northwest, which had ITS big climax via a chase across Mount Rushmore.

The Berserk Carousel and the Mount Rushmore Cliffhanger Chase. Hitchcock's two biggest action finales...for a reason. He was looking for box office after slow, dramatic art films.

Runners-up: the plane crash into the sea in Foreign Correspondent and the Albert Hall Concert Assassination attempt in The Man Who Knew Too Much '56 (but that one isn't the climax of that movie.)