linguistic:translation
Contemporaneous reception

Initial critical reception for Vertigo was mixed. Variety wrote that the film showed Hitchcock's "mastery", but felt the film was "too long and slow" for "what is basically only a psychological murder mystery". Similarly, Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times admired the scenery, but found the plot took "too long to unfold" and felt it "bogs down in a maze of detail". Scholar Dan Auiler says that this review "sounded the tone that most popular critics would take with the film". However, the Los Angeles Examiner loved it, admiring the "excitement, action, romance, glamor and crazy, off-beat love story". The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther also gave Vertigo qualified praise by stating that " secret is so clever, even though it is devilishly far-fetched." Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post praised the film as a "wonderful weirdie," writing that "Hitchcock has even more fun than usual with trick angles, floor shots and striking use of color. More than once he gives us critical scenes in long shots establishing how he's going to get away with a couple of story tricks." John McCarten of The New Yorker wrote derisively that Hitchcock had "never before indulged in such farfetched nonsense."

The New York Post review echoed many critics': "Let's admit it right now. Hitchcock's surfaces are so smooth he thinks he can get away with murder in the logic and realism departments. If you want to tear 'Vertigo' apart, it rips easily. On the other hand, there's no denying that James Stewart's unactorish acting carries a heavy air of reality into the picture, and Kim Novak's somnambulistic behavior, called for by the script, is something she can do to perfection....It's doubtful that 'Vertigo' can take equal rank with the best of the Hitchcock studies—it has too many holes—but it assays high in visual confectionary of place, person, and celluloid wiles."

Contemporaneous response in England was summarized by Charles Barr in his monograph on Vertigo: "In England, the reception was if anything rather less friendly. Of the 28 newspaper and magazine reviews that I have looked at, six are, with reservations, favourable, nine are very mixed, and 13 almost wholly negative. Common to all of these reviews is a lack of sympathy with the basic structure and drive of the picture. Even the friendlier ones single out for praise elements that seem, from today's perspective, to be marginal virtues and incidental pleasures – the 'vitality' of the supporting performances (Dilys Powell in The Sunday Times), the slickness with which the car sequences are put together (Isobel Quibley in The Spectator)".

In France, Éric Rohmer noted in Cahiers du Cinéma that " Vertigo, so they say, repelled Americans. French critics, on the contrary, seem to be giving it a warm welcome." Praising the film's formal technique, he wrote that "ideas and forms follow the same road, and it is because the form is pure, beautiful, rigorous, astonishingly rich, and free that we can say that Hitchcock's films, with Vertigo at their head, are about ideas, in the noble, platonic sense of the word."

Hitchcock fans were not pleased with Vertigo 's departure from the romantic-thriller territory of earlier films, or with the mystery being solved well before the film's ending. Orson Welles disliked the film, telling Henry Jaglom that it was "worse" than Rear Window, which he had also disliked. In an interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock stated that Vertigo was one of his favourite films, with some reservations. He blamed the film's limited success on the 49-year-old Stewart looking too old to play a convincing love interest for the 24-year-old Novak.

A young Martin Scorsese viewed the film with his friends during its original theatrical run, and later recalled that "even though the film was not well received at the time... we responded to the film very strongly. didn't know why... but we really went with the picture."

The film received awards at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, including a Silver Seashell for Best Director for Hitchcock (tied with Mario Monicelli for Big Deal on Madonna Street) and Best Actor for Stewart (tied with Kirk Douglas in The Vikings). The film was nominated for two technical Academy Awards for Best Art Direction – Black-and-White or Color (Hal Pereira, Henry Bumstead, Samuel M. Comer, Frank McKelvy) and Best Sound (George Dutton).