VERTIGO A
USA (128 mi) 1958 restored
version in 1996 (129 mi)
Man does not yield
himself to the angels, nor to death utterly, save only through the weakness of
his feeble will.
—“Ligeia,” epigraph, by Edgar Allen Poe, 1838
Do you believe that
someone out of the past, someone dead, can take possession of a living being? —Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore)
VERTIGO is the midway point of the Hitchcock voyeur trilogy,
beginning with REAR WINDOW (1954) and concluding with Psycho (1960),
all films that deal with heightened personal obsessions that lead from being a curious
snoop and a neighborhood nuisance to sheer madness. As films that reveal the most insight into the
director himself, these movies are invaluable, becoming case studies of the man
behind the camera. What makes the film
so unique is how deeply personal it is, yet simplistic, mainly consisting of
only three characters, where for the first time in a man’s life he’s fallen
deeply in love, but it turns into a Surrealist, nightmarish obsession. Despite its elevated status, voted by critics
in the latest 2012 BFI Sight & Sound
once-a-decade poll Sight
& Sound 2012 Polls | BFI | British Film Institute as the #1 film of all
time, finally overtaking CITIZEN CANE (1941), the first time since 1962,
VERTIGO is not nearly as entertaining as the other two films in the trilogy and
is one of the more downbeat and slowly developing of all Hitchcock films. Coming directly after The
Wrong Man (1956), it would be hard to find two back-to-back commercial films
from any major American director that end on such a grim note, and it was not a
box office or critical success upon release, but its reputation has only grown. VERTIGO is a sophisticated suspense thriller,
a thinking man’s movie, the kind Hitchcock built his reputation upon and the
kind critic’s admire. At heart a ghost
story, the story concerns a woman who is inhabited by the ghost of an ancestor,
who wanders the streets and can’t remember where she’s been, who may be a
danger to herself as the ghost committed suicide at the same age. It doesn’t hurt that the lady is easy on the
eyes, Madeleine (an icy blond Kim Novak), the wife of an old college friend of
Scottie (James Stewart), an ex policeman recently retired from the force, where
we learn why just after the exquisite Saul Bass opening credit sequence. Chasing an escaping criminal across the
barely lit rooftops of San Francisco, Scottie clings to a gutter, otherwise
dangling from a high rise building, while his partner falls to his death trying
to help him. Like a cliffhanger sequence
shown in weekly serials, Hitchcock never explains how he managed to get down
safely, but the scene moves effortlessly back to normality in the next scene. Scottie feels the man’s death is his fault
and suffers vertigo symptoms ever since.
His recovery under the tutelage of friend and confidante Midge
(screenwriter Samuel Taylor’s invention, as she was not in the novel), a comforting
and bespectacled Barbara Bel Geddes, an artist who still carries the torch for
him but is too shy to show it, couldn’t be more banal, as Scottie is obviously
bored stiff, too caught up in his own self-pity, where he can barely keep his
mind on the conversation. His friend
Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) asks Scottie to tail his wife, believing some harm
could come to her, as she doesn’t seem herself these days. Scottie initially has little interest, but
once he sees Madeleine, showcased by Hitchcock in a stunning entrance, he’s
hooked.
Hitchcock uses his experience from Silent era films, as a
good opening portion of the movie is almost entirely wordless, where Scottie passively
tails Madeleine, always seen as remote and distant, cast in an air of mystery,
yet alluringly beautiful, using fog filters for a dreamlike effect, seen as a
walking ghost as she visits various sights around San Francisco, Ernie’s
restaurant, Podesta’s flowershop, Mission Dolores, the Palace of the Legion of
Honor, the Palace of Fine Arts, Coit Tower, and Fort Point with dazzling views
of the Golden Gate Bridge, becoming a veritable travelogue of one of America’s
most photogenic cities, shown in glorious Technicolor on perfectly sunny days
where there’s not a cloud in the sky.
Shot by Robert Burks, the clarity of colors is unusually clean,
especially with recently restored prints, including 70 mm screenings. For decades, VERTIGO was impossible to see,
one of The
Five Lost Hitchcocks where their rights were bought back by the director
and willed to his daughter, kept out of circulation for more than 25
years. Unfortunately, as they were
stored privately in less than ideal storage facilities, these films required
extensive restoration work by film historians Robert Harris and James Katz, but
except for a few smudged moments, the prints are pristine. This is also one of Bernard Hermann’s most
gorgeous musical works, a hypnotic, intensely romantic score using classical
Wagnerian themes reminiscent of Tristan
und Isolde, a bold, widely expansive, dreamlike love that is induced by a
love potion in the opera, creating the magical illusion of love, especially the
Liebestod,
which has ominous love-death implications, where Madeleine similarly appears to
be sleepwalking her way through her various wanderings, as if in a dream, especially
since she can’t recall where she’s been.
When she throws herself into the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay, she
becomes George Bailey, the James Stewart role in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946),
while Stewart himself takes on the role of Clarence, her guardian angel,
gallantly rescuing her and warming her up afterwards by the fire in his nearby
apartment. This casual acquaintance
suddenly turns into something more, becoming lovers despite knowing she’s
married to one of his best friends, but Scottie can’t resist, wanting to be
with her all the time, obsessed by the illusion of love where women are an
unattainable ideal, existing only in the form of wish fulfillment, where they
take trips together into the nearby old growth forests of Big Basin Redwoods
State Park in Santa Cruz, or the panoramic vista of Cypress Point at Pebble
Beach, where their first kiss is accentuated by thunderous crashing of waves, or
head south down the coast to the Mission of San Juan Batista (where there is no
tower, it was painted into the scene), which plays such a prominent role in the
film, as it’s a place she describes to him in her dreams. But when he brings her there, thinking
everything will magically blossom into love, hoping to make the illusion come
real, she fatalistically throws herself off the bell tower to her death, where
Scottie is mortified, helpless to save her from his vertigo which prevents him
from reaching the top of the tower. This
comes as a shock to the audience, as she’s been the focus of nearly the entire
opening half of the movie, where there’s likely been a growing connection
established, and suddenly she’s gone.
Adapted from the French novel D’Entre les morts (From Among
the Dead), written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the same duo that
wrote Diabolique
(Les Diaboliques), where Hitchcock had expressed an interest in obtaining
the rights to the book, so the writers for all practical purposes had Hitchcock
in mind when they wrote the book. Storywise,
VERTIGO harkens back to Fritz Lang’s 1921 film DESTINY (Der Müde Tod), an
expressionist fairytale where a woman whose lover has died enters the Kingdom
of Death to plead for his life, only to relive her loss in three successive reincarnations. Madeleine’s death, replicating the suicide of
the ghost that haunted her, is only the first half of the film, where Scottie’s
name is cleared from being implicated in her murder, but the coroner (Henry
Jones) lays it on pretty thick about how outrageously convenient it is that he
suffers from vertigo, as had he not had this condition Madeleine would likely
still be alive today. This sends Scottie
into a catatonic state, suffering from his own nightmares, blaming himself for
her death, reliving the experience over and over again, where nothing seems to
clear his head from this horrendous nightmare.
Following the experience of intently watching a mysterious woman, the
film shifts its focus of attention onto Scottie himself, where its his interior
world that seems to matter. At some
point later, he’s back on his feet, where he sees visions of Madeleine
everywhere, as if the ghosts are calling out for him, returning to all the
familiar places, but he’s only frustrated, until by chance, he sees someone
walking down the street who bears a strange resemblance, following her to her
hotel where he attempts to meet her.
Though she’s a brunette and talks differently, Kim Novak also plays Judy
Barton, much more forward, more carnal, proudly wearing no brassiere, supposedly
a working class girl from Kansas. But
all Scottie sees is Madeleine, becoming infatuated with every detail of Judy’s
life, again wanting to spend every waking minute with her. At first reluctant, finding his advances
somewhat clumsy and old school, she eventually capitulates, where in flashback
we realize the truth, a daring device revealed only to the audience, shown very
matter of factly, but she keeps it from Scottie as their relationship
progresses. Instead of the love she
hoped for, Scottie grows impatiently overcontrolling, obsessively convinced
she’d look better if dressed the way he insists, or wore her hair the same as
Madeleine, demanding that she transform herself into the dead woman he still
loves and dreams about. The fanaticism
displayed by Stewart is discomfiting, a startling demeanor from a guy perceived
as predictably comfortable and safe, a kind of normal everyman, now veering
towards the panicked anxiety of Norman Bates in Psycho. This obsessive compulsion, however, perfectly
describes the Hitchcock
blonde, the inclination of the director to transform all his leading ladies
into cool and sophisticated, icy blonds, such as Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly,
Kim Novak, Tippi Hedron, and a dozen more, perhaps going all the way back to
Anny Ondra in Blackmail
(1929), (Hitchcock's
earliest blonde: Anny Ondra « Feminéma).
What’s especially creepy is seeing how Scottie’s compulsion to mold a
woman into what he wants is so prevalent in the movie industry and our consumer
oriented society, where magazine covers, music videos, and scantily clad female
performers all sell some pre-conceived idea of what men supposedly want to see,
such as the most recent Super Bowl halftime show Beyoncé’s
Super Bowl Style With Destiny’s Child: Total Touchdown.
What Hitchcock does with shifting camera angles and expressionist
color schemes in the second half of the film is near delirious, especially his
use of the color green from the neon sign outside Judy’s hotel window, never
more sensuous and seductive, but also deadly, even going animated, perhaps
second only to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s INFERNO (L’Enfer) (2009), recently reconstructed
by directors Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea from 13 hours of unfinished
footage shot by Clouzot in 1964, showing manic hysteria through kinetic energy
with lights pulsating on and off continually altering the experimental 60’s look
of the screen. Hitchcock’s vertigo shots
are also tantalizingly risqué, where stairways in Scottie’s eyes have an
additional form of constant movement, where looking down he only sees
instability, with stairs advancing and receding at once, creating a
shape-shifting state of imbalance. What’s
also interesting is the exaggerated state of dark humor used by Hitchcock,
where Scottie goes so far off the rails that an audience is amused by the
razor-sharp focus of detail. After an
afternoon shopping in an exclusively upscale women’s store in an attempt to
replicate the exact outfits of Madeleine, Judy has grown exasperated, literally
pleading with Scottie, “Couldn't you like me, just me, the way I am?” Rather than an embrace of reciprocated love,
Scottie instead remains transfixed at what’s missing in this complete transformation,
“The color of your hair!” Scottie then
leaps at the opportunity, completely oblivious of how it makes her feel, blind
to the degrading humiliation, and completes the conversion from a lowly brunette
sales clerk to a sensuous ice goddess, where in a Hitchcock film sexuality
exists only as an obsession, one that degrades women and deranges the minds of men.
Stewart develops a mania by the end of
the picture that rivals his state of frenzy in Anthony Mann westerns, like Winchester
'73 (1950), the first time anyone had seen this maniacal side to the
otherwise calm and gentlemanly nature of his character. In VERTIGO, the relentless obsession only
grows more feverish, where it would be hard for anyone not to break under such
intense scrutiny. A film of intense personal
devastation and lost love, existing in what amounts to a state of illusion,
where Scottie desperately tries to remake Judy in Madeleine’s image while Judy
just as desperately hopes Scottie will fall in love with her for who she is, and not some dead ghost from the
past. In Hitchcock films, the darker
side always wins out, where the dead rise from their graves and wreak havoc on
the living.
It should be pointed out that film essayist Chris Marker
explores this film in greater detail in his own work Sans
Soleil (1983), a film
that questions the role of time and memory in shaping our ideas of history and
the past. He includes striking footage
from the film, perhaps drawn to the material because, very much like his own
observant work, it’s a film about watching, where seen from Scottie’s
viewpoint, the audience is also drawn into the developing fixation on
unraveling the mysteries of the film. According
to Marker, “the vertigo the film deals with isn’t to do with space and falling;
it is a clear, understandable and spectacular metaphor for yet another kind of
vertigo, much more difficult to represent—the vertigo of time.” Madeleine’s character unleashes a flood of
memories and suppressed emotion, where both Scottie and Madeleine are already
haunted by ghosts of the past before they meet, becoming more combustible when
they grow close, as if combining their haunted pasts provides an incendiary
effect, where memory has a way of resurrecting itself. Sans
Soleil is a film about the impossibility
of memory to be truly accurate, conjuring up excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday Poetry X » Poetry Archives » T. S.
Eliot » "Ash Wednesday":
Because I know that
time is always time
And place is always
and only place
And what is actual is
actual only for one time
And only for one place
Eliot’s poem is a struggle between the worlds of time and
that of the eternal, as moments take place in a singular space, never to be
repeated. Similarly, time will never be
recreated, where like the dizzying effects of vertigo, the closer one seemingly
gets to it, the farther it moves away in a pulley-like push-pull effect. Marker is particularly fascinated by the San
Francisco travelogue aspect of VERTIGO, as he uses a similar technique in Sans
Soleil, where the mysteries explored are contrasting cultures and images
through excerpts of documentary footage, or fragments of the past. Marker draws upon history much like film
characters rely upon their own memories.
For example, Marker revisits many of the locations used by Hitchcock in
the film, splicing in the actual VERTIGO footage with his own pilgrimage, offering
his own observations of both the present and how he remembers the past,
recalling his experiences of initially viewing the film in a theater, while the
audience will bring their own recollections of the film to Marker’s comments,
producing an echo effect, where film is used to create a unique blending of
memory. A perfect example Hitchcock
creates is the moment when Judy walks into the bathroom but comes out as
Madeleine, as if resurrecting a ghost, yet this is the woman Scottie yearns
for, where past and present, illusion and reality, finally merge. Time and again Hitchcock shows us images
reflected by mirrors, suggesting only one is real, while the other is a
reflected illusion, an idealized substitute, suggesting memories are interior
mirrors that have a life of their own, where illusion and reality are often
indistinguishable, altering and reshaping themselves as we grow, producing
reverberating emotions even as we try to understand their powerful effects upon
us. It should also be pointed out that
the opening shot is a close up of the human face, seen as a mask that one
wears, and as the eyes dart back and forth, it is suggestive that one never
knows what goes on inside the mind of a person, where the title actually comes
swirling out of a close-up of an eyeball, suggesting we are all uniquely
different, as the subjective nature of the film then goes on to prove, where
Hitchcock is concerned with our deepest impulses, with what defines us as
human, providing a window into a darkly disturbing vision of the world.
Note – Hitchcock’s personal appearance comes at about the
11-minute mark walking across the foreground at the shipping yards as Scottie
is about to meet with Elster.
