You should re-watch Shadow again sometime in the future, it's definitely better than the two other films you've watched.
I think saying you have to "get past" the first part rather dilutes what is one of the greatest films ever made. It is simply a story that benefits from being watched at least twice.I've always thought of it as a typical film noir until half way through and then it deals with Stewart's obsession. It's almost two films in one.
This and North By Northwest seem to be rather misunderstood on this forum! Hopefully with time the errors will be corrected.
"slow and broken"? No, really not. What an absurd notion! Hitchcock didn't make Noirs, but that's exactly what the essence of Vertigo is and he slavishly follows the genres convention for the first half. What you might see as slow, I see as him preparing to undermine expectation by running in second gear and following the rules of typical thrillers of the time, before it becomes a true Hitchcock film during the superb hotel room sequence.He was famous for his meticulous preparation (no-one used storyboards before him), so you should accept what you see as by design, not accident (ie, broken) and then springboard from there to consider why it's like that. There are several great films which use a similar method of aping another genre to force the viewer into a certain perception.It might sound like I'm making an excuse for Vertigo, but I'm not. And I'm not saying he's perfect and beyond mistakes, because he certainly did a bunch of mediocre movies and even a bad one or two, but when you consider why and when Vertigo was made and its influence since, you find the director at the top of his game. If he didn't get Vertigo right, you might as well write him off as a second-rater...
...Well, in my opinion its still slow and broken in places Jon. Im sorry but