Vertigo. Cast: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, Henry Jones, Raymond Bailey, Ellen Corby, Konstantin Shayne, Lee Patrick. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay: Alec Coppel, Samuel Taylor, from the novel D’entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Cinematography: Robert Burks (colour by Technicolor, Vistavision). Art directors: Hal Pereira, Henry Bumstead. Costumes: Edith Head. Editor: George Tomasini. Music: Bernard Herrmann. Special effects: John P. Fulton, Farciot Edouart, W. Wallace Kelley, John Ferren. Production: Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions. Restoration: Robert A. Harris, James C. Katz, 1996. USA, 1958, 127 minutes.
Style **** Substance ****
Take it from Scottie Ferguson: If you’re not careful, an affair can make life shorter still. Need a painkiller? See Vertigo again. – Julia Szabo, “Why Vertigo Beat Citizen Kane to Become the Top Rated Film”
In a post elsewhere online I opine that Ernst Lubitsch’s frothy Trouble in Paradise may well be my favorite movie. However, a recent viewing of Vertigo may make the result more like a tie [1]. Anyhow fascinating to note that in both films the central character has broken the rules and fallen in love with the mark, but how different the treatment: with its intense emotional content, Vertigo may be seen as the dark mirror to Trouble in Paradise’s ebullient, quasi-screwball comedy feeling, the latter film nothing more and nothing less than a Cole Porter tune come to life. But where we might shrug our shoulders and simply say ‘it was just one of those things’ when referring to Trouble in Paradise, we’d never indulge ourselves in such an offhand dismissal when considering Vertigo.Kim Novak resplendent
It was a sometimes surprising experience to see the great film again, the first time I’d caught it on the big screen since its mid-80s re-release [2]. So many praiseworthy things about it: Herrmann’s haunting score, the phantasmagoric colors, Edith Head’s costumes … one could go on and on; critics and devotees have gone on and on. This time I was struck by its incredible, and incredibly complex, emotional content, and most of all, by the sadness and desperate longing embodied in the character of Judy/Madeleine, brought so spellbindingly to life (or is it death?) by Kim Novak in her wondrous performance. Up until the scene at Ernie’s in which Miss Novak enters the movie, it’s a fairly bland, and talky, mystery story set-up. But once the mysterious Madeleine makes her unforgettable entrance, the film really takes off and never lets up. Indeed, and with no disrespect to the great James Stewart, a terrific actor, from this point forward it’s really a Madeleine story.
As for our nominal hero Scottie, he’s already a broken man long before he meets Judy/Madeleine, the acrophobia and his back injury a metaphor for his irreparably damaged psyche. Although we're given few details about his past and as a result mostly in the dark as to his psychological history, we're thrown a nugget of a clue early on when it's revealed that Midge broke off their engagement twenty years or so prior, for reasons not revealed. Even so, he continues to needle her about it and protest too much that he’s still available (‘available Ferguson’). Another viewing helps me appreciate Barbara Bel Geddes’ touchingly sensitive portrayal – much overlooked in light of Stewart’s showy performance and Kim Novak’s more subtle, enchantress-like presence. In spite of all this Midge still loves him, treating him much like a mother, even referring to herself as such.
This time around I wasn’t quite so upset by Scotty’s heavy-handed treatment of Judy; the guy’s not a monster, he’s just hopelessly misguided and obviously unbalanced, more to be pitied than vilified. And we have to remember that Judy, sympathetic and beautiful as she is, is herself at least accessory to murder, just one step away from being a murderess. Indeed, unpleasant as Scotty may be, Judy is arguably technically the more evil of the two. Which reminds me: a fussy plot complaint (one of potentially many) – why didn’t Judy simply leave San Francisco, and for that matter why would Elster abandon someone so ethereally beautiful, to say nothing of the fact that she has the goods on him? And another thing … well, as you see, Vertigo isn’t about plot – a Golden Age puzzle mystery where all the pieces fit comfortably and logically together it most certainly is not, quite the contrary. And that’s rather the whole point: that life, and love, doesn’t always come out right in the end.
But, as intimated above, Vertigo is ultimately about Madeleine/Judy, and Kim Novak is utterly convincing in assuming the personas of two very different women. Moreover, everything about her performance is absolutely flawless; it’s a no brainer that it’s her best role ever. And, reports to the contrary that Hitchcock didn't like her as an actress, one could make a case that she's the ultimate icy Hitchcock blonde. I’d go one better and declare that her incredibly nuanced reading, revealed only though repeated viewings, is the best single performance by any actress in cinema history, or close to it. It’s almost fantastical to think she was all of 25 years of age when she delivered such a rich portrayal. Vera Miles? Grace Kelley? In this role? Gimme a break. It all inspires me to up the ante even further and suggest that, based on this performance alone [3], she has a strong claim as the best film actress of all time, though I do confess a great fondness for Gloria Swanson, especially her incomparable turn as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. In either case: take that, Kate Hepburn!
Interesting to consider Ms. Novak’s recent comments on her bipolar disorder :
“I was very erratic. I did suffer from mental illness. I didn’t know it at the time. At times I was focused. Other times, the press would come on the set and I’d feel the energy of people laughing at me or not approving of my style of acting. You could pick up those feelings. I was distracted. I couldn’t perform as well. I was erratic in my performances, I feel.”
It goes a long way toward explaining her wafty, slightly unfocused acting style. To a certain extent this is present in Vertigo, but somehow this time she was able to magically transform this disability into a positive with her multi-layered, enigmatic performance. Curiously, she considers Vertigo not one of her better films. Sorry, Kim, I beg to differ, in a big way. It’s also fascinating to recall the possibly spurious stories that she could be glimpsed during subsequent visits to San Juan Bautista Mission, where she would sit on the wooden benches and stare across the large lawn at the church, lost in her own meditation. A penny for her thoughts. Somehow, even if apocryphal, it’s an irresistible image.
Officially anointed the greatest movie of all time, Vertigo is easliy Hitchcock’s most written about work. And inasmuch as critics and film historians have explored its aesthetic depths more fully, Julia Szabo’s above-referenced essay is perhaps my favorite, as it comes closest to the bone in getting to Vertigo’s fear of falling (in love) message for today’s chatroom gestalt, especially for those of us of a certain age who feel especially susceptible to the seductive, but alas, elusive, and often illusory, allure of the perfect love. We may not be as damaged, or obsessive, or legally culpable as the characters in Vertigo, but in our ways just as imperfect.
Case in point: the one ‘normal’ character, Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), is at best a flawed heroine. Nonetheless, how beautiful – and passionate – the character, and actress; Scotty was a fool to reject her, and perhaps she’s as much a fool in her obviously hopeless quest to win his affections.
Indeed, what strikes me upon re-visiting the film is not the incredible visual flourishes, or great detail [4], to mention only a couple of its virtues, but its compassion and humanity, for Vertigo is not really about romantic obsession per se, and it’s absurd to call it a murder mystery. Ultimately it’s of the human impulse, and, yes, need, to connect with others, to love and be loved, and the sometimes heavy toll said impulse takes on the spirit and psyche, even when things work out well in the end. At its core then Vertigo is a love story, however offbeat.
But as for the vehicle and style to express such a story: as mentioned above Vertigo is not a conventional romance and even less a mystery, but rather, a mood piece, a meditation, similar in tone to the Forties supernatural romantic fantasies like Portrait of Jennie, The Uninvited, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. And for all of Vertigo’s much discussed extravagant colors and luxuriant on-location San Francisco photography, it has a remarkable similarity in mood and treatment to the low budget RKO Val Lewton supernatural noir thrillers of the early Forties, however different, at least in purely visual terms, its saturated look is from the stripped down studio bound aesthetic of the Lewton films.
As if in an attempt to restore all the illusions and hopes Vertigo so cruelly thwarts, Stewart and Novak were paired again the same year in the much more feel good if arguably artistically inferior Bell, Book, and Candle, which might be seen as a sunny sequel, or even the happy ending version of Vertigo, in which Kim Novak reprises, or to be more precise, offers a lightweight variant of the enchantress Madeleine in the form of a looking-for-love Greenwich Village witch, who, like Judy/Madeleine, becomes mortal when she falls in love. One is tempted to invoke the film’s memorable closing line: “who knows what magic really is.” But, as Ms. Szabo gently cautions us in her aforementioned essay, this soothing balm in Gilead doesn’t even come close to exorcising the psychic demons which Vertigo conjures up.
The greatest film?
Much has been made of Vertigo’s bumping Citizen Kane as the #1 film of all time [5], at least according to the critics (Sight & Sound poll, 2012). A separate S&S directors’ poll places Ozu’s Tokyo Story as #1, with Kane second, actually tied with 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Vertigo placing a respectable seventh. In any event, we have a split decision of sorts, though the critics’ poll has gotten a lot more ink.
For me, however, it’s the great emotional and, if you will, spiritual, content of Vertigo that sets it apart from other masterpieces or near-masterpieces, whether directed by Hitchcock or not. We can cite two examples : Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Welles’s Kane, both eminently watchable, and impressive technical achievements, but both of which have barren emotional/metaphysical cores.
Even so, Vertigo divides viewers and critics to this day. There’s still lots of debate about whether Hitchcock was right to reveal Judy’s secret to the audience two thirds of the way through. My feeling is that he was correct, absolutely, because, on a simplistic level, this creates suspense, and yes, discomfort, for the rest of the film, rather than relying on an Agatha Christie-esque scenario in which the surprise is revealed only at the end.
[1] Two recent viewings actually, one of them in HD no less – incredible.
[2] I remember watching Vertigo on TV in the 60s and 70s, 'Saturday Night at the Movies', I think the program was called, and the narrator portentously intoned “Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” And I was hooked for life. Then the film went into its legendary out of circulation status, to re-emerge in the mid-1980s when I last saw it in the theatre. I also caught the expert 1996 restoration and its commentary a couple of times on DVD.
[3] To say nothing of her other, not so well known roles: Of Human Bondage, Middle of the Night, The Man with the Golden Arm.
[4] Just the art works and antiques alone in Scottie’s and Midge’s apartments merit especial praise. Ditto for Elster’s office and its scrumptious carpet and furniture. And still more kudos for the gossamer lighting effects at Mission Dolores. But for all its detail, there’s an artificial quality to Vertigo, which, combined with the great washes of color and the dreamy San Francisco landscapes and environs, that suggests a quasi-surrealist feeling akin to films like the aforementioned Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.
[5] Oops! In the 2022 poll, Vertigo slipped all the way to second place, being supplanted by Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as the current critics' choice as the 'greatest movie of all time.'
Further reading: Brandie Ashe, Kim Novak in Vertigo: A Hypnotic Presence; Death and the Detective : Vertigo Revisited; A Month of Vertigo : the Boggers and Their Posts; Vertigo (no. 2) ; Rhik Samadder, My Favorite Hitchcock : Vertigo; An Inconsequential Yarn: Writing Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; The Critical Transformation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
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