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VERTIGO 1958
I guess it says something about a suspense thriller when you can watch it multiple times, long after the central mystery of its plot has been revealed, with no lessening of engagement or enjoyment. In the case of Alfred Hitchcock’s mesmerizingly bizarre Vertigo, the film itself is so unusual, its subject matter so psychosexually dark, I find myself forgetting the “surprise reveal” of the mystery altogether and just getting lost in what a perversely obsessive vision of romance a major Hollywood studio was able to get away with in the repressed environment of the late-'50s. As one of five films owned by Hitchcock and removed from circulation in 1973 so his lawyers could better hammer out new deals for their television and theatrical distribution rights (the others being The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rope, Rear Window, and The Trouble With Harry), Vertigo wasn’t available for viewings of any kind, singular or multiple, during my high school and college years. The deceptively simple suspense plot about a retired detective who falls in love, and later becomes obsessed with, the woman he's been hired to follow, is one of the darkest and self-revealing films in the Hitchcock canon.
Barely Hanging On Vertigo is a film about a man's psychological spiral into the abyss
Considered neither a commercial nor critical success on its initial release, Vertigo’s reputation had grown significantly by the mid-70s, due in large part to the film’s unavailability, but perhaps most significantly as a direct result of the emerging, youth-inspired / New Hollywood reevaluation of Hitchcock and his works. Spearheaded by
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the French New Wave and director François Truffaut’s by-now-classic 1967 book of interviews: Hitchcock by Truffaut, a generation of young movie fans has come to regard Alfred Hitchcock (previously considered little more than an efficient workmanlike, studio-system director of suspense thrillers) as an auteurist maverick in the manner of contemporaries John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles. This well-taken (if functionally naïve) position was readily adopted by me and most everyone else I went to film school with—the mean age of the collective student body betraying the fact that Vertigo was, to most of us, one of those films more discussed than actually seen.
Jimmy Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson
Kim Novak as Madeline Elster
Kim Novak as Judy Barton
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Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge Wood
As a kid, the full extent of my knowledge of behind-the-scenes motion picture personnel were the opposite-ends-ofthe-spectrum names of Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. With only the most cartoonish notion of what a director or producer actually did (I had, after all, seen all of the “Lucy goes to Hollywood” episodes of I Love Lucy), thanks to the TV anthology series Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, I knew one thing: Disney meant funny and Hitchcock meant scary. Hitchcock’s The Birds and the deeply traumatizing Psycho had enough of a “Creature Features”/ William Castle vibe about them to satisfy a young person’s notion of what a scary movie should be. But Vertigo (which had its network TV premiere in 1965 and reran consistently), despite Hitchcock’s name and the similar one-word title, was just too slow and kissy-faced to hold my interest. Once it became clear that Kim Novak’s rigid hairdo wasn’t in danger of crow attack, or that Jimmy Stewart wasn’t going to be donning a dress or wielding a knife anytime soon, I gave up on trying to sit through it. By the time I reached my teens and interest in Vertigo renewed, it was too late. I ultimately didn't get to see Vertigo until after it was released on DVD, restored and pristine, in 1999. WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS For Bay Area kids in the '70s, scary movies meant one thing and one thing only: Creature Features FILM Contrasted with my youthful antipathy towards Vertigo, my adult response to the film was near-obsessive adoration. I immediately fell in love with its absorbingly intriguing plot and the descriptively cinematic methods Hitchcock uses to both tell the story and reveal character. A trait shared by most of the filmmakers I most admire is their fluency in the visual language of film. They don’t just record events with a camera; they use the medium to shape our perceptions of what is happening and what the characters are feeling. I’m not always persuaded by Hitchcock’s sometimes jarring shifts from visually striking location shots to patently fake-looking studio sets and process photography, but in a story as subjectively stylized as Vertigo, even artificiality works in the film’s favor. (My partner, who doesn’t exactly worship at the altar of Hitchcock, thinks the director’s predilection for rear-screen projections and patently sound-studio outdoor sets recall the look of Disney’s live-action films. A running gag is for him to poke me in the ribs at any instance of obvious rear-projection or stagy outdoor sets in a movie and exclaim (in mock sincerity), “Oh look, Ken…a Hitchcock film!”)
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PERFORMANCES I’ve commented before on my theory that movie star appeal (as opposed to actor appeal) is rooted in a performer’s ability to consistently project a distinct personal quality about themselves from film to film. To, in effect, imprint each role with their personality rather than lose themselves within a character. I don’t know very much about Kim Novak’s personal life, but of all the '50s sex symbols, she has always struck me as one of the most sadeyed and reluctant. She never appeared to enjoy the objectification that is the sex symbol’s stock in trade. Rather, like the character she played in the film Picnic, Novak always seemed to be of a somewhat shy personality, sensitive and desirous of someone to take notice of something about her beyond her beauty. It’s this quality Kim Novak brings to the dual characters of Madeline/Judy in Vertigo. A quality one might go so far as to say is exploited by Hitchcock, given how painfully tangible Novak makes Judy’s longing for Scottie to love her for herself. As dramatically compelling as they are, I confess that I find the sequences where Scottie attempts to make Judy over in Madeline’s image to be particularly painful to sit through. I derive no pleasure from the subtle self-deprecation glimpsed behind Judy’s poignantly eager-to-please glances and nervous smiles as Scottie demands more and more of the real Judy to retreat into his fantasy. These scenes are so difficult to watch because those flashes of resigned sadness in Judy harken back to that
Alfred Hitchcock's much-analyzed "pure cinema" style is greatly in evidence throughout Vertigo. The dizzying spiral motif.
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dolefulness I’ve always perceived in Novak’s eyes in other films.
Hitchcock was the best at using imagery to convey emotional states
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Vera Miles was originally cast in the Kim Novak role but had to drop out of Vertigo due to pregnancy. Hitch was not happy
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There's been much written about the tortured character of Scottie, but equally forceful is the character of Judy, a woman who allows herself to be made over not once, but twice, in the image of another man's ideal. It's a lamentable, psychologically brutalizing motif standardized in the fashion industry and even romanticized and rendered "cute" in movies like Grease. I think Kim Novak is marvelously affecting and heartbreaking in Vertigo and her performance is easily the best of her career. THE STUFF OF FANTASY As a former resident of San Francisco, I have a weak spot for movies that make the city look like my idealized memories of it. The San Francisco of Vertigo was long gone before I ever moved there, but it’s every bit as picturesque.
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THE STUFF OF DREAMS: “All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” Frederico Fellini Show me a filmmaker who denies his work has autobiographical subtext, and I’ll show you a filmmaker with good reason to try to convince himself of the lie. (Back in 1971, Roman Polanski “doth protest too much” when critics took note of his Manson-esque depiction of slaughter in Macbeth; likewise, Woody Allen took the same tact when the whole Mia Farrow/Soon Yi mess made the 42 year-old man/17 year-old girl romance at the center of Manhattan seem forever icky.) On its own merits, Vertigo is a near-perfect suspense thriller with a devastating tragedy at its center. The lovers are plagued by personal flaws and compulsions that induce them to act in ways which doom their union no matter how many times it’s played out. It’s a strange, deeply romantic film whose themes feel assertively antithetical to the kind of romantic myth typical of Hollywood films in the 1950s. What provides the film with its extra, voyeuristic kick is how closely Vertigo’s narrative hews to what has come to be known about Alfred Hitchcock’s personal obsessions and
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Top: In Vertigo Hitchcock takes full advantage of the strange, spectral quality of the color green. Below: The same eerie hue was used to equally chilling effect in the poster art for my favorite film of all time, Rosemary's Baby
compulsions. Whether apocryphal or substantiated, the Hitchcock section of the library is loaded with tale after tale of his fixation on icy blondes and apparent fetish for eyeglasses. Stories of his professional relationships with actresses Vera Miles and Tippi Hedren read like a character analysis of Vertigo’s Scottie Ferguson.
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I've never been much of a fan of Jimmy Stewart, but if Vertigo works at all, it's because of his movingly tortured performance. Cast against type as a somewhat unpleasant and haunted character, Vertigo seems to tap into a heretofore unexplored cruelty in the actor which makes his Scottie so flawed and vulnerable. I've never seen him better.
It’s this personal overlay that gives Vertigo its eerie punch and makes it feel at times as if the film were a subtly confessional probe into the darkest corners of what we sometimes label desire.
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Jimmy Stewart & Kim Novak were paired again in the 1958 comedy, Bell Book & Candle. Here they make a cameo appearance on the film's soundtrack album cover in this shameless bit of product-placement from the Shirley Booth TV show Hazel. (Both were produced by Columbia Studios.)
Vertigo is not my favorite Alfred Hitchcock film (that would be Shadow of a Doubt) but for me it’s the movie where he most perfectly conjoins popular entertainment and art. It’s a beautiful film that’s very watchable, but there is something unpleasant and sad about it. Something that nevertheless feels very human and is therefore very familiar.
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Copyright © Ken Anderson About Ken Anderson LA-based writer and lifelong film enthusiast. You can read more of his essays on films of the ’60s & ‘70s at Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For.
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