Vertigo (Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, Paramount, 1958; reissued by Universal, 1984)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I showed Charles was Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, blessedly letterboxed to the original VistaVision format (which in turn was considerably less oblong than CinemaScope) and preceded by a documentary, Obsessed with “Vertigo,” hosted by Roddy McDowell (that queen!), dealing equally with the original production (including some costume-test stills of the original female star, Vera Miles — replaced by Kim Novak after she got pregnant! — in the famous grey suit) and the controversial restoration by Robert Harris and Robert Katz, which reportedly cost more than a million dollars and involved re-recording the entire soundtrack so Bernard Herrmann’s beautiful musical score could be added to the film in stereo (as it was recorded in the first place). While I don’t agree with the critical assessment in the documentary that Vertigo is Hitchcock’s all-time best film — as magnificently moody and obsessive as it is, there are some longueurs in it and I’d rate a few of Hitchcock’s earlier films as better, including Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train and the similarly obsessive Notorious, which has some interesting plot similarities to Vertigo — it is a masterpiece (inexplicably left out of The Film Noir Encyclopedia — as was Rear Window, despite the latter’s basis in a short story by echt-noir writer Cornell Woolrich: the Hitchcocks they did list were Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Strangers on a Train and The Wrong Man), rich and dazzling, clearly a personal statement of Hitchcock’s own obsessions in spite of (or perhaps because of) a nasty streak of male chauvinism epitomized by this statement of Hitchcock himself from his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid Muse:

"One girl is dead and the James Stewart character has had a nervous breakdown. Then he discovers a brunette girl who resembles the dead woman. You’re really starting a new story and asking yourself: What are the audience saying now? 'Oh, he’s found another girl. She looks like the dead one so he wants to make her over.' By revealing the truth you give the audience two more things to think about: What will Stewart say when he finds out it’s the same woman? Will the girl submit to the making-over? We can understand her objections. Previously we wouldn’t understand her objections. Had I saved everything until the end the audience would have been more or less impatient with Stewart making over the girl." [Emphasis added.]

I find it incredibly revealing that — in the context of discussing a film that deals so extensively with role-playing and the control certain kinds of men exert over women — Hitchcock would say that “we wouldn’t understand her objections” to being ruthlessly dictated to by a man in terms of specifying the exact outfit she must wear and the hair color she must adopt, all so she can take on the resemblance to his idealized, (presumably) dead lover (Stewart’s character tells her over and over again in the dialogue that he doesn’t care about the living Kim Novak, only her presumably “dead” incarnation) if we didn’t already know that she was the same woman and she had been forced through this process once before. As he often was, Hitchcock was more honest in his film than he was in his discussion of it — we sympathize with poor Judy’s plight as the simple discomfort of a woman whose individuality is being systematically stripped from her and who is being remodeled to replicate a dead dream-image; and our pre-knowledge of who she “really” is (i.e., that Novak/“Judy” and Novak/“Madeleine” are really the same person) only adds an overlay of intensity to her grim emotions through this scene. There are enough witnesses to Hitchcock pulling real-life scenes like this with his leading actresses, especially the ones he worked with after Vertigo — taking them clothes-shopping and meticulously instructing them on what to wear and how to wear it, off-screen as well as on — to indicate that he saw absolutely nothing wrong with a man treating a woman this way (as indeed the characters in Vertigo don’t either — the female salesperson who keeps telling Novak, “the gentleman seems to know what he wants,” just adds that much more claustrophobia and demeaning humiliation to the scene).

I presume from Hitchcock’s overall comments that in the original novel (From Amongst the Dead by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the French authors who also wrote the novel on which Diabolique was based, and who later told Hitchcock they had deliberately written From Amongst the Dead with the aim of writing something for which Hitchcock would want to buy the movie rights!) the leading man doesn’t know the woman he’s picked up and made over is the same person as the one he was trailing earlier until the very end of the story. It’s interesting to imagine what the film might have been like if Hitchcock hadn’t moved up the revelation to early in the film’s second act — the ending would have been more of a jolt (like the ending of Diabolique, in which any clarity as to who is doing what to whom is kept from us until the very last minutes) but the movie might have lost some of its power early on, especially in the scene in which the “new” Kim Novak, suited and blondined and made up to an exact simulacrum of her alter ego, emerges from a logically inexplicable but visually arresting fog in the middle of a cheap room and she and Stewart clinch. (Fortunately Harris and Katz retained the foggy quality of this scene in their restoration instead of mindlessly “correcting” it to crisp, clear color.) When I first saw Vertigo — in the theatrical reissue of 1984, though not in wide-screen and in color values that seemed perfectly adequate to me even though Harris and Katz have criticized them — I remembered being particularly impressed by the Bernard Herrmann score (especially the way he copied the central musical device of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde — stacking chromatic chords on top of each other without resolving them — for the same dramatic purpose: the musical depiction of an unrequited and doomed love) and the long stretches of dialogue-less film which give away the fact that Vertigo was directed by a man whose career as a director started in the silent era.

This time around I appreciated those same values and was also amazed by the marvelous acting of Kim Novak. There’ve been a lot of patronizing words written about her performance in this film — Hitchcock himself said, “What fascinated me was the idea that Jimmy Stewart was trying to turn the girl into someone she once had to play as part of a murder plot and is later trying not to be — and I’m not sure Kim Novak had the ability to put this across,” and screenwriter Samuel Taylor (who had to share writer credit with Alec Coppel, who wrote a previous, rejected version, even though all accounts I’ve read of the production indicate that Taylor rewrote the whole film start-to-finish and probably should have got sole credit) said, “If we’d had a brilliant actress who really created two distinctly different people, it would not have been as good. She seemed so naïve in the part, and that was good. She was always believable. There was no ‘art’ about it, and that was why it worked so very well.” Knowing what we do about how Novak got into movies in the first place — she’d done a TV commercial for refrigerators in 1953 and attracted the attention of Harry Cohn, autocratic founder of Columbia Pictures, who had let Marilyn Monroe go after six months in 1948 and, now that Marilyn was a big star, wanted to find another girl with big tits and make his own Monroe clone — we can see how the whole idea of playing a woman who is constantly being “directed,” being taken over by rich and powerful men and forced to remodel herself physically according to their whims, tied in to her own life and was therefore a role she could play well. (This part of Taylor’s comment I agree with; a “brilliant actress” might have been tempted to make Madeleine and Judy too different, thereby undercutting the film’s credibility when Hitchcock and Taylor let us know they’re really supposed to be the same person.)

Hitchcock shoots the makeover in a way that makes it resemble an actress being prepared for a movie scene (even down to that chilling moment in which her lips are painted by an unseen hand and we see it through one of those gigantic magnifying glasses movie makeup artists use), creating one of those marvelous moments in film in which illusion stacks upon illusion and the process of filmmaking itself becomes the only reality — and, as I’ve written before, I find it fascinating that a director who said he would never work with Marilyn Monroe because her sex appeal was too obvious was nonetheless able to take an actress who’d been carefully built up as a Monroe clone and turn her into “his kind of woman.” (Indeed, it’s possible to read the initial appearance of Novak in her “Judy” persona — brown-haired, as Monroe was genetically; slovenly, ill-dressed and coarse and common in manner — and Hitchcock’s transformation of her into the “Madeleine” persona, blonde, well-tailored, impeccably groomed and upper-class in manner, as his ultimate comment on what he thought of the high-priced sex bombs of the 1950’s and how anemic and unattractive they were compared to his own dream vision of the high-class, enigmatic cool blonde.)

Charles told me after we watched Vertigo that he too had seen it for the first time in the 1984 revival, and had remembered the barest elements of the suspense plot — including the revelation that the two Kim Novak characters were one person and the final confrontation at the bell tower — but not the psychological aspects of the film or its overall spirit of obsession. I told him that when I first saw it I picked up on an important contradiction in the plot — that Carlotta Valdes, the ancestor whose spirit was supposedly reincarnated in Novak as “Madeleine,” was supposed to have been a suicide but was actually buried inside a mission, in what would have been consecrated ground and therefore off limits to a suicide victim according to Catholic theology. I don’t think this was just a mistake, since Hitchcock was a practicing Catholic all his life and knew the theology of his religion well enough to avoid something that obvious (though there’s an even more obvious physical mistake in the final film: both times Stewart and Novak drive from San Francisco to the mission in Santa Cruz, they drive on the left side of the road, as if Hitchcock had momentarily forgotten he wasn’t in England anymore!); and when I first saw the film I conceived the idea that Carlotta, Madeleine (the real one — the wife of Tom Helmore that we don’t see except in that flashback showing how she was actually murdered) and Judy are all done to death by the men they loved: Carlotta (in the backstory) presumably ordered killed by the rich man who’d kept and then abandoned her; Madeleine killed by her husband in the elaborate murder plot that underlies the first half of the film; and Judy taken to the bell tower and driven to her death psychologically by the Stewart character.

Charles didn’t think much of this explanation, since the actual death of Novak at the end is directly precipitated by the nun who climbs the bell tower and appears at the end (in line with Hitchcock’s skill at indirection, she appears at first as only a black shape — more devil than angel — and it’s only when she calls out, then steps into full light, that we realize it’s only a nun and she has a perfectly rational reason to be there). But when I first saw Vertigo I read the final scene as one in which Stewart is responsible for Novak’s death — after all, he’s been attempting to destroy her psychologically, and he’s sufficiently mentally unhinged in the final scene that one could readily imagine him killing her if she hadn’t first accidentally fallen after the nun — serving almost literally as a dea ex machina — startled her. (David Thomson said that Hitchcock had once intimated that Stewart’s own character might have jumped from the tower right after the fadeout, to join his beloved in death à la The Flying Dutchman.) The film also carries over a lot of the legend of Tristan and Isolde — not only the Wagnerian adaptation but also the original tale, in which there are two Isoldes, the original one and the later one (Isolde of the White Hands) with whom Tristan takes refuge after the scene in the garden and the fatal wound from Melot (comparable in a way to the two separate personae of the Kim Novak character in Vertigo).

And has anyone else noticed that — in a 1958 film, with the Production Code slightly weakened but still very much in place — the Tom Helmore character blatantly and unmistakably gets away with murder? (As we find out at the end, he dumps the Novak character who was his accomplice, flees to Europe and gets to spend his dead wife’s fortune while his unwitting accomplice, Stewart, stays behind and has his nervous breakdown.) Hitchcock may have been influenced here by the success of some of his TV shows in leaving the murderer unpunished at the end — and there are plenty of references to his earlier films as well, including that obscure French-language short, Bon Voyage, echoed in Vertigo in the first scene in the bell tower, first shown to us in real time and then in a flashback that, like the second half of Bon Voyage, lets us in on the information we need to find out what the scene “really” means. — 10/11/97

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Last night (Saturday, June 24) Turner Classic Movies showed a pair of films I really wanted to watch, including a movie that’s one of my all-time favorites: Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 romantic melodrama in thriller guise featuring James Stewart as John “Scottie” Ferguson, a San Francisco police detective forced into early retirement after a colleague falls to his death during a rooftop chase. He’s hired as a private detective by Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), an old college friend but one whom he barely remembers, to tail Elster’s wife Madeleine (Kim Novak). Madeleine has supposedly become obsessed with her long-dead great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdez, who lived in San Francisco in the early 19th century when California was still part of Mexico. Scottie traces her on long drives through San Francisco, including stops at a seedy hotel that was once the Valdez family home and the Legion of Honor museum, where a painting of Carlotta hangs. I first heard of Vertigo in the late 1960’s after my father gave me a copy of David Thomson’s book Movie Man, which also introduced me to a number of other, even kinkier films by major directors (Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Lady Without Camelias, Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes and Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us), though I didn’t get a chance to see it until 1984, when Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia cut a deal with Universal to reissue it and four other films Hitchcock owned outright (Rope, Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry and the second – and, I think, decidedly inferior – The Man Who Knew Too Much). That turned out to be a sensation, as even four years after his death Hitchcock asserted his superiority over all still-living thriller directors.

It also sparked renewed interest in Kim Novak, who’d been hired by Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures in 1953 because Cohn had briefly had Marilyn Monroe under contract in 1948 and let her go after six months and only one film (Ladies of the Chorus, a surprisingly good “B” musical directed by Phil Karlson, who got more out of Monroe than many of her more prestigious directors did). Like a lot of other Hollywood producers, Cohn decided to create his own Monroe clone, and he chose a woman whose real name was actually Marilyn – model Marilyn Novack – and decided to rename her “Kit Marlowe.” She rebelled and agreed to accept “Kim,” the name of an ancestor and close to “Kit,” as a first name, while keeping “Novak” as her last name and just dropping the “c.” One thing that has often struck me about Kim Novak’s career is that she was frequently cast as a woman who’s involved with a man who, for no-good reasons of his own, physically and stylistically remodels her into his image of a perfect woman – a plot line that seems to parallel Novak’s own grooming at Harry Cohn’s hands. Her first film in a leading role, Pushover – a 1954 film noir starring Fred MacMurray and essentially a knockoff of Double Indemnity, only instead of a corrupt insurance agent he’s a corrupt cop – shows her being groomed by MacMurray’s character as part of a scheme to grab the missing $210,000 an at-large criminal and his partner stole in a bank robbery – and Novak would continue to play parts in which she was being remodeled by powerful men until her last major film, The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), in which she played a young actress who attracts the attention of a veteran film director (Peter Finch) because she’s the spitting image of his late wife Lylah Clare, also a movie star, and he decides to cast her in a biopic.

I fell in love with Vertigo in 1984 and I still love it today, even though I was upset when it replaced Citizen Kane atop the Sight and Sound decennial poll of the 10 best movies ever made in 2012 (if any film deserved to displace Citizen Kane it was 2001: A Space Odyssey), and I don’t consider it Hitchcock’s best movie (I’d rate Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious and Strangers on a Train ahead of it). My husband Charles also first saw it in 1984, and when we re-watched it together for the first time in 1997 I wrote an extended journal entry about it (see above) that referenced all sorts of parallels, including Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (as well as the original Gottfried von Strassburg Tristan, in which there are two Isoldes, as there are two characters played by Kim Novak in the film even though they turn out to be the same person). This time around I was also struck by the parallel between Vertigo and Rear Window, made four years earlier and also with Hitchcock as director and Stewart as star, and though he’s not physically wheelchair-bound in Vertigo as he was in Rear Window, in both films he’s essentially a walking-wounded man traumatized by an accident and nursed to health by a female “buddy” (Thelma Ritter in Rear Window, Barbara Bel Geddes here) who makes fun of the growing attraction between Stewart’s character and the usual Hitchcock “cool blonde” (Grace Kelly in Rear Window and Novak here).

Also last night was the first time I’ve seen Vertigo since I read Sir James M. Barrie’s play Mary Rose (1920), a story Hitchcock never got to film even though he wanted to literally for the entirety of his career. He’d seen the premiere production of Mary Rose – a fantasy-drama about a young woman who periodically disappears from life and reappears having not aged a bit, despite however long she’s been gone – and been fascinated by the whole idea, including the practical problem of what we would do with the dead if they did start coming back to life en masse. But Universal, the studio where he ended his career, was so fearful of the lack of commercial appeal of this story that they actually had it written into Hitchcock’s contract that he could not make Mary Rose – a real pity because it could have been one of Hitchcock’s greatest films (and after Marc Forster’s brilliant Finding Neverland, in which Barrie appears as a character, I thought he’d have been the perfect director to take up Mary Rose after Hitchcock’s death).