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Le Cinema Dreams Film Essay: Vertigo 1958

Apr 16, 2017

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Page 1: Le Cinema Dreams Film Essay: Vertigo 1958
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lecinemadreams.blogspot.com http://lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2012/03/vertigo-1958.html

VERTIGO 1958

I guess it says something about a suspense thriller when you can watch it multiple times, long after the centralmystery of its plot has been revealed, with no lessening of engagement or enjoyment. In the case of AlfredHitchcock’s mesmerizingly bizarre Vertigo, the film itself is so unusual, its subject matter so psychosexually dark, Ifind myself forgetting the “surprise reveal” of the mystery altogether and just getting lost in what a perverselyobsessive vision of romance a major Hollywood studio was able to get away with in the repressed environment ofthe late-'50s.

As one of five films owned by Hitchcock and removed from circulation in 1973 so his lawyers could better hammerout 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 ormultiple, 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 OnVertigo 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 grownsignificantly by the mid-70s, due in large part to the film’s unavailability, but perhaps most significantly as a directresult 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 byTruffaut, a generation of young movie fans has come to regard Alfred Hitchcock (previously considered little morethan an efficient workmanlike, studio-system director of suspense thrillers) as an auteurist maverick in the manner ofcontemporaries 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 filmschool with—the mean age of the collective student body betraying the fact that Vertigo was, to most of us, one ofthose 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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For Bay Area kids in the '70s, scary movies meant one thing and one thing only: Creature Features

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-of-the-spectrum names of Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. With only the most cartoonish notion of what a director orproducer actually did (I had, after all, seen all of the “Lucy goes to Hollywood” episodes of I Love Lucy), thanks to theTV 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 hadenough of a “Creature Features”/ William Castle vibe about them to satisfy a young person’s notion of what a scarymovie should be. But Vertigo (which had its network TV premiere in 1965 and reran consistently), despiteHitchcock’s name and the similar one-word title, was just too slow and kissy-faced to hold my interest.Once it became clear that KimNovak’s rigid hairdo wasn’t indanger of crow attack, or thatJimmy Stewart wasn’t going to bedonning a dress or wielding aknife anytime soon, I gave up ontrying to sit through it. By the timeI reached my teens and interestin Vertigo renewed, it was toolate. I ultimately didn't get to seeVertigo until after it was releasedon DVD, restored and pristine, in1999.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THISFILMContrasted 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 usesto both tell the story and reveal character. A trait shared by most of the filmmakers I most admire is their fluency inthe visual language of film. They don’t just record events with a camera; they use the medium to shape ourperceptions 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 patentlyfake-looking studio sets and process photography, but in a story as subjectively stylized as Vertigo, even artificialityworks in the film’s favor.(My partner, who doesn’t exactly worship at the altar of Hitchcock, thinks the director’s predilection for rear-screenprojections and patently sound-studio outdoor sets recall the look of Disney’s live-action films. A running gag is forhim to poke me in the ribs at any instance of obvious rear-projection or stagy outdoor sets in a movie and exclaim (inmock sincerity), “Oh look, Ken…a Hitchcock film!”)

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Alfred Hitchcock's much-analyzed "pure cinema" style is greatly in evidence throughout Vertigo.The dizzying spiral motif.

PERFORMANCESI’ve commented before on mytheory that movie star appeal (asopposed to actor appeal) is rootedin a performer’s ability toconsistently project a distinctpersonal quality about themselvesfrom film to film. To, in effect,imprint each role with theirpersonality rather than losethemselves within a character.I don’t know very much about KimNovak’s personal life, but of all the'50s sex symbols, she has alwaysstruck me as one of the most sad-eyed and reluctant. She neverappeared to enjoy theobjectification that is the sexsymbol’s stock in trade. Rather,like the character she played in thefilm Picnic, Novak always seemedto be of a somewhat shypersonality, sensitive and desirousof someone to take notice ofsomething about her beyond herbeauty.It’s this quality Kim Novak brings tothe dual characters ofMadeline/Judy in Vertigo. A qualityone might go so far as to say isexploited by Hitchcock, given howpainfully tangible Novak makesJudy’s longing for Scottie to loveher for herself.As dramatically compelling as theyare, I confess that I find thesequences where Scottie attemptsto make Judy over in Madeline’simage to be particularly painful tosit through. I derive no pleasurefrom the subtle self-deprecationglimpsed behind Judy’s poignantlyeager-to-please glances andnervous smiles as Scottiedemands more and more of thereal Judy to retreat into hisfantasy. These scenes are sodifficult to watch because thoseflashes of resigned sadness inJudy harken back to that

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Hitchcock was the best at using imagery to convey emotional states

dolefulness I’ve always perceived in Novak’s eyes in other films.

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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, awoman 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 andrendered "cute" in movies like Grease. I think Kim Novak is marvelously affecting and heartbreaking in Vertigo andher performance is easily the best of her career.

THE STUFF OF FANTASYAs a former resident of San Francisco, I have a weak spot for movies that make the city look like my idealizedmemories of it. The San Francisco of Vertigo was long gone before I ever moved there, but it’s every bit aspicturesque.

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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 goodreason to try to convince himself of the lie. (Back in 1971, Roman Polanski “doth protest too much” when critics tooknote of his Manson-esque depiction of slaughter in Macbeth; likewise, Woody Allen took the same tact when thewhole Mia Farrow/Soon Yi mess made the 42 year-old man/17 year-old girl romance at the center of Manhattanseem forever icky.)

On its own merits, Vertigo is a near-perfect suspense thriller with a devastating tragedy at its center. The lovers areplagued by personal flaws and compulsions that induce them to act in ways which doom their union no matter howmany times it’s played out. It’s a strange, deeply romantic film whose themes feel assertively antithetical to the kindof romantic myth typical of Hollywood films in the 1950s.Whatprovidesthe filmwith itsextra,voyeuristickick is howcloselyVertigo’snarrativehews towhat hascome to beknownaboutAlfredHitchcock’spersonalobsessionsand

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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 taleof his fixation on icy blondes and apparent fetish for eyeglasses. Stories of his professional relationships withactresses 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 typeas 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 subtlyconfessional 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'ssoundtrack 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 hemost perfectly conjoins popular entertainment and art. It’s a beautiful film that’s very watchable, but there issomething 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 AndersonLA-based writer and lifelong film enthusiast. You can read more of his essays on films of the ’60s & ‘70s at DreamsAre What Le Cinema Is For.

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