Vertigo
Alfred Hitchcock (1958)
When I was about nine, it was on television one evening. I was terrified by the James Stewart character’s bad dream, couldn’t watch anymore and had to go to bed, where it took me a long time to get to sleep. I’d never seen the film in its entirety until yesterday in NFT1, when I managed not to doze off, although it was sometimes a struggle. (Stewart’s nightmare – apart from the concluding image of the falling man, used on the Saul Bass-designed poster for the film – was underwhelming; it certainly seems garishly shallow compared with Professor Borg’s dreams in the nearly contemporary Wild Strawberries.) The picture’s fortunes too have changed over the half-century since its original release. It opened to mixed reviews and didn’t do that well at the box office. In later years, it’s appeared on top ten lists of the greatest films of all time. Neither of these two things seems too surprising but on balance – and in spite of the various astonishing features of Vertigo – I tend to agree with the lukewarm American public of 1958.
Stewart plays John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson. In the opening, breathtaking sequence, Scottie (in plain clothes) and a uniformed policeman are pursuing a man across rooftops. Scottie trips and falls; he then hangs on – extremely precariously and looking down in terror at the street miles below – to a ledge, which looks about to give way. In the course of trying to save Scottie, the other officer falls to his death. Exactly how Scottie survives is unexplained but the incident leaves him, unsurprisingly, with an extreme fear of heights, manifested in persistent vertigo, and he retires from the force. We pick up his life when he’s talking with his friend (formerly and briefly his fiancée) Midge, a lingerie designer, in her San Francisco apartment. Vertigo overpowers Scottie even when he tries climbing up a stepped stool. He is approached by an old college acquaintance, Gavin Elster, who asks Scottie to follow his beautiful wife, whose name is Madeleine. Elster is concerned that Madeleine has become obsessed with – may even be possessed by the spirit of – a woman who turns out to be one of her ancestors, name of Carlotta Valdes. (This information emerges in a way that seems clumsily rather than tantalisingly piecemeal.) Madeleine’s days are spent visiting Carlotta’s grave and a painting of her that hangs in a museum. As he follows her around, Scottie becomes strongly attracted to Madeleine. At the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, Madeleine appears to attempt suicide by jumping into the San Francisco Bay and Scottie dives in to save her. Madeleine tells him of her dreams that take place at a mission. This, like the cemetery and the museum, is a place that Madeleine travels regularly to, some way out of San Francisco, but seems to have no recollection of visiting. Scottie drives her to the mission in an attempt to conquer her troubling dreams. At the mission, Madeleine suddenly runs into the belltower, where Scottie’s vertigo prevents him from following her all the way up the staircase. Through a window, he sees Madeleine plummet from the top of the tower to her death.
After an inquest at which he’s harshly censured, Scottie descends into a depression in which he’s silent and unreachable even to the loyal Midge. We next meet him having emerged from catatonia but evidently obsessed with trying to find the love he’s lost, stopped in his tracks in the street or a restaurant by any well-tailored ice blonde that might fit the bill. He then sees a young woman whose face resembles Madeleine’s, although her hair is darker. He follows her to her hotel room – it’s the same one where Madeleine was staying earlier in the story (and the hotel was the Valdes family home a century earlier) – and talks with her. The young woman’s name is Judy; she’s an ordinary girl from Kansas – a bit tarty, compared at least with the super-refined Madeleine. After Scottie persuades Judy to have dinner with him and she’s left alone, we learn that she is the woman he knew as Madeleine and that Elster employed her to pretend to be the mentally unstable wife that he actually threw from the belltower. Judy, for her part, really did fall in love with Scottie; she decides to go ahead with seeing him instead of leaving him a letter revealing who she really is and what really happened. As their relationship develops, Scottie tries to refashion Judy in Madeleine’s image and eventually succeeds completely. One night, as she’s dressing for dinner, he notices her wearing a blood-red, jewelled pendant that belonged to Madeleine (and which features strongly in the nightmare sequence). At this point, the policeman eclipses the demented lover in Scottie. He sees what Judy has been up to, drives her in the gathering dusk to the mission belltower, and angrily forces her to confess the truth. She does and he appears to forgive her. As they go into a clinch, a spooky, shadowed figure comes up the steps and startles Judy, who falls off the ledge to her death.
Vertigo is adapted (by Samuel A Taylor and Alec Coppel) from a French crime novel, Sueurs froides: entre les morts, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, but the film is echt Hitchcock. The angles and deliberate movements of the camera (of which you’re probably more than usually conscious because much of the film moves slowly), the effective (if pretty obvious) use of lighting and objects to denote psychological or sexual states, the female iconography – these elements in combination leave you in no doubt about the auteur. How much of this makes for cinematic art of originality or quality is harder to say. BFI supplied two notes. One of these, by Dave Kehr (in Film Comment (May/June 1984)), includes statements like:
‘The spatial organisation of [the sequences in which Scottie follows Madeleine], with the observer and the observed isolated in separate shots, duplicates the spectator’s position before the screen: we watch Madeleine as Scotty (sic) does, and he watches Madeleine as we watch Vertigo.’
The last statement must apply to a great many films where the person on screen is observing, unseen, another person. The other note, by Peter Wollen (in Sight and Sound (April 1997)), is a mostly interesting and convincing read and it’s possible that what I take to be its conclusion is simply the end of an extract that’s being used. But, on the face of it, it seems misleadingly to imply that Vertigo culminates in Scottie’s disillusionment:
‘The disintegration of his dream leads inevitably to discovery of the full depth of his deception and his loss, to the traumatic realisation that his bewitching image of Madeleine, far from being a magical dream, had been created simply as a prop in Elster’s banal murder plot.’
In fact, this realisation is overtaken, in rapid succession, by other banalities, although they’re emotionally effective ones – in the way Hitchcock makes them virtually collide: Scottie’s forgiveness of Judy and their embrace; the shock tactic of Judy’s death fall; the film’s ending there and then, before we can notice anything other than that Scottie has managed to look down at the fallen body without feeling giddy. This heartless superficiality is, I know, what’s supposed to be part of why Hitchcock is the Master although I never can see what’s great about it. His admirers can probably see some good reason too for the (usual) terrible, wooden acting in most of the smaller parts in the film – by Tom Helmore (as Elster), Henry Jones (the coroner), Raymond Bailey (the doctor in the clinic) and Konstantin Shayne (a local historian-bookseller).
Vertigo really takes off – the tempo increases and the themes expand – at the point at which Scottie meets Judy. His attempts to recreate her as Madeleine extend well beyond a single character’s obsession into a critique of a particular type of male-female relationship in the society in which the story is set (the staff in Ransohoff’s costumier’s, where Scottie takes Judy to be kitted out, are surprised but not appalled that he insists exactly how she’s to be dressed); then into the larger territory of Hollywood’s moulding of its female stars. From there, the material develops greater specificity – and, I assume, self-awareness – in dealing with Hitchcock’s notorious preference for and preoccupation with a particular physical type as his leading lady. The casting of Kim Novak as Madeleine-Judy (even if Vera Miles was Hitchcock’s first choice) is especially fascinating. Having seen her last year in Pal Joey and The Man With the Golden Arm, where she seemed self-conscious and painfully awkward as a performer but – because of that – had a distinctive and touching presence, I thought in the early scenes of Vertigo that Novak was more sympathetically cast as a woman who exists primarily as a fascinating, elusive image. The problems start as soon as the dialogue begins. Kim Novak sounds weirdly disconnected from whatever she’s required to speak and it makes little sense when we’re told that Madeleine keeps going into a trance: Novak never seems to be out of one. Yet, while she may be a weak performer in every technical sense, she’s once again here a strongly unhappy presence and her odd, stately movement – which seems to combine ethereality and uncertainty – virtually dictates the pace of the picture. When she reappears as Judy, the dark wig has the effect of a mask: satisfied that she’s in disguise, Novak is unusually free. She still seems a very limited actress but at least you can understand at this point how on earth it was that she got into the acting profession in the first place. Because there are moments when Judy, with her streak of coarseness, seems rooted in life rather than celluloid, the way she’s treated by Scottie and her eventual fate are distressing in a way that takes you by surprise; and the effect is intensified by having Kim Novak in the role of a living brunette whom a fetishist wants to turn into a replica of a woman he thinks is dead. (This is given an added edge, of course, by our knowledge that Hitchcock wants the brown-haired aberration to revert to his preferred Nordic blonde type.)
As Scottie’s pal Midge, Barbara Bel Geddes provides presumably ironic evidence that he might have had an agreeable life with an attractive fair-haired woman if their college days’ engagement hadn’t ended after three weeks. Bel Geddes is particularly good in her first scene, in which she has to impart a lot of set-up information but manages to do so naturally, creating a reasonably believable character as she goes along. She and Stewart get a nice affable rhythm going – they convincingly suggest a real friendship but one laced with unresolved tensions. Even so, Bel Geddes is badly used by Hitchcock. The scene in which Midge offends Scottie by painting a portrait that comprises her own head and the body and costume of Carlotta Valdes is offensively stupid: you just don’t believe Midge would produce a picture as thoughtless (and egocentrically tasteless) as this. When Scottie walks out on her, the director ruins the effect of Bel Geddes’ angry self-remorse by having her simply repeat it. The staging of her last scene with a doctor in the clinic where Midge has been visiting Scottie is incredibly crude. It’s good nevertheless to be reminded that Barbara Bel Geddes the actress was much more than Miss Ellie (and that Ellen Corby, as the hotel owner here, was more than Grandma Walton: she gives a rather too busy performance but it’s a lot better than the men in the supporting roles).
Alfred Hitchcock has plenty to thank Bernard Herrmann and James Stewart for in the course of his career. In this uneven film, Herrmann’s score stands out as perhaps the most sustained – and dramatically sustaining – element, expressing emotional layering as well as psychological disorder and obsession. Stewart is awfully good too; not just at the things you expect – the self-deprecating wit and charm, the sense of a decent, essentially ordinary man going into dark places – but also in his willingness to go to those places. Or most of the time anyway: there are a few moments when you sense Stewart would find it easier to be his usual likeable self. Hitchcock uses him very astutely – and uses the audience’s feelings of affection and respect for Stewart to increase the sense of shock at seeing Scottie in the depths of depression and, especially, at his exploiting Judy for psychologically deviant and startlingly selfish purposes.
Postscript: One remaining puzzle: when Scottie is first trailing Madeleine and sees her standing at the window of her hotel room, he goes in and asks the hotel owner who the woman on the second floor is. The hotel owner says, as Scottie expects, that her name is Carlotta Valdes but that she’s not in her room. Incredulous, he insists that she goes up to check, which she does and confirms that the room is empty. Is the idea that Scottie, because he’s becoming obsessed with Madeleine, imagined that he saw her in the window?
20 March 2009