January 9, 2012

7 Deadly Obsession: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

****
Country: US
Director: Alfred Hitchcock


What's that old Oscar Wilde thing? "Each man kills the thing he loves . . ." That I think is a very natural phenomenon, really.
—Alfred Hitchcock, in a 1963 interview


In his fifty-five year long career in films, Alfred Hitchcock directed sixty-seven movies. At least a dozen of these are bona fide masterpieces, and about an equal number are excellent movies that fall just short of the masterpiece mark. By any measure that's an impressive record, one unequaled by any other filmmaker I can think of. Even more impressive is that Hitchcock's pictures are not rarefied works of art of interest mainly to aesthetes and film scholars, but full-blooded movies that appeal equally to ordinary filmgoers looking for accomplished entertainments and to cinephiles looking for an intellectually and artistically stimulating film-viewing experience. Of all Hitchcock's pictures, none managed to combine these two modes—entertainment and art—so skillfully, so intriguingly, and so pleasingly as his 1958 film Vertigo.

Most people are familiar with the plot of Vertigo. A retired San Francisco police detective, John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart), psychologically traumatized after a rooftop chase to apprehend a criminal ends badly, is targeted as a dupe by his old college friend Gavin Elster, who exploits Scottie's crippling fear of heights to bring off an intricate scheme to murder his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak). The film's plot is a clever one and since this is a mystery thriller with hints of the supernatural (can Madeleine really be the reincarnation of her ancestor, as she believes?), neither the audience nor Scottie realizes what is really happening until quite far into the film. This allows the viewer's understanding of the situation to be manipulated, just as Scottie's is, to create a mood of suspense and, after the truth is revealed to the viewer about three-quarters of the way through the film, for that suspense to be prolonged as the film proceeds in a completely unexpected direction right up to its shock ending.

Such a narrative strategy requires that the viewer's reactions be precisely guided at every turn, and nobody was more expert at this than Hitchcock. Well known for his need for absolute control over all aspects of his films from conception to release, Hitchcock was by temperament the epitome of the film auteur, the director who puts his stamp on every element of his work. The way he accomplished this was by meticulous attention to detail. Because each shot was storyboarded in advance, the final film essentially needed no editing and thus was immune to tampering with by producers and studio executives. Like most filmmakers who began by directing silents, Hitchcock viewed cinema storytelling as essentially a visual process, with dialogue, music, and sound used to augment the film's imagery. Because the way he chose to show the action—placement and movement of the camera, the use of visual effects that form his famous set pieces, the exact way images succeed one another to form a spatial and narrative continuum—was the product of his own imagination, his films always seem expressions of a personal and very distinctive vision. Many directors have made movies in the Hitchcock style, but I can't think of a single one of those films that on close viewing could actually be mistaken for the work of the master himself.

Because of the convoluted and deceptive nature of its plot, Vertigo is even more dependent on Hitchcock's almost obsessive attention to detail as a means of controlling audience response than any other film he made. But in Vertigo he uses his working methods as much more than merely a practical means of telling a story in his own way. He amplifies his control-freak approach to directing until it becomes an all-encompassing aesthetic used to suggest a great deal more than is apparent in what at first seems little more than a deftly contrived suspense melodrama. It is this effect of using every device in his vast repertoire of cinematic tricks to evince the complex psychological and thematic undertones of the film that makes Vertigo Hitchcock's greatest achievement. It's a haunting film that can be watched again and again and still continue to entertain and thrill and deliver new revelations.

Perhaps the most powerful and resonant thing about the film is the way Hitchcock uses repetition to emphasize the idea of doubling. Elements in the first part of the film recur later in the film, and elements in the later part of the film mirror those in the first part, giving the film a strange pattern of symmetrical associations. Scottie seeks out places where he saw Madeleine in the beginning of the film and revisits them later in the film: the missions, the florist's shop, the museum, Ernie's restaurant. He watches Judy at her hotel window the same way he watched Madeleine at her hotel window earlier. His transformation of Judy into Madeleine exactly duplicates Elster's transformation of Judy to pass her off as his wife.

Near the end of the picture Hitchcock expresses the complete fusion of Madeleine and Judy, of past and present, of Scottie's memories and his dreams, in the most striking of several memorable set pieces in the film—a long, passionate kiss between Scottie and Judy after he sees her for the first time as the fully re-created Madeleine. The camera swirls, Scottie and Judy swirl, and the room appears to revolve around them. The background fades from Judy's room to the stable where Scottie and Madeleine kissed for the last time and finally back to Judy's room again, while Bernard Herrmann's glorious music—clearly inspired by Wagner's Tristan und Isolde—surges and pulses in unison with the intense emotions of the passage. It's the most rapturously erotic scene in a Hitchcock movie since the kiss in Notorious.

Hitchcock was famous for his lack of interest in the acting of his performers, and for saying that actors should be treated like cattle, that is, prodded into doing what he needed for the shot he was working on. This was perhaps a holdover from his silent days, when facial expressions, body language, and movement were more important than character development and line delivery because the director essentially created the performance visually, through the staging and editing of the film. This is one reason experienced theater actors often found working with Hitchcock such a frustrating experience. Yet for all this, in Vertigo he gets two remarkable performances from his stars.

It is well documented that Kim Novak was not Hitchcock's first choice to play Madeleine/Judy; Vera Miles was. But by the time he was ready to begin shooting, Miles was pregnant and so somebody else had to be cast. I have no idea how he hit on the idea of casting Kim Novak, but I did notice that just as Elster and Scottie transform Judy into the image of Madeleine, Hitchcock almost seems to transform Kim Novak into an uncanny image of Grace Kelly, right down to her hair and makeup, and her accent and diction. I can't help wondering if one of the reasons Vertigo seems to be Hitchcock's most personal film is his own understanding of the compulsion behind Scottie's Pygmalion-like behavior.

In any event, Novak, who under the right conditions could be a much better actress than she is generally given credit for, does a tremendous job as the mysterious, spaced-out Madeleine. But her more demanding incarnation as Judy is even more impressive. If Madeleine is an enigma, Judy is a fully defined character. Hitchcock and his writer, Samuel Taylor, make a daring narrative decision that happens soon after Scottie meets Judy. The conventional thing to do would have been to conceal the truth about the murder plot from the audience until the end then reveal it to the viewer and Scottie at the same time, in the kind of twist ending typical of films of this kind. Instead Hitchcock and Taylor devise a situation in which Judy writes a letter to Scottie explaining everything to him then impetuously tears it up before he sees it.

The audience is now aware of the true nature of events even if Scottie isn't, and the entire tone of the movie has changed. Now that we know the truth, the point of view shifts much more in Judy's direction. The crux of suspense is no longer what really happened, but how long will it take Scottie to figure it out and what will be his reaction when he does. What all this means for Novak's performance is that she can no longer play her character as an enigma, but must externalize the conflict Judy feels about what she has done to Scottie and the ambivalence she feels about his controlling attitude. Novak's role immediately becomes much more demanding, and she handles the requirements of those demands admirably. If only she looked less like a caricature of a rather common shopgirl!

But the real center of the movie is James Stewart's Scottie, a character who inspires Stewart to give one of the most remarkable performances of his career. We tend to think of the screen persona of James Stewart as that of an optimistic, boyish everyman. But in truth Stewart's characters often had a dark side to them, a willfulness that threatened to cause the passion of their emotions to spill over into obsession. We tend to forget this because until Vertigo, even though that dark side might threaten to take over whatever character Stewart was playing—George Bailey or even Jefferson Smith for Frank Capra or one of the revenge-driven men in the Westerns he made with Anthony Mann, for instance—at the end of the film his character always managed to pull back from the brink before he went over the edge. Hitchcock himself perceived the latent darkness in Stewart's screen image and used it as a sort of dangerous recklessness in the characters Stewart played in Rope and Rear Window. But in Vertigo, for the first and only time I can think of, Stewart's character is completely overcome by the darkness in him and propels the film to a catastrophic conclusion.

During the course of the picture, Stewart must convincingly go through a series of changes that illustrate the stages of the disintegration of Scottie's personality. At the beginning of the movie, he seems like the familiar James Stewart. He has experienced a traumatizing event, his life has been drastically changed by it, and he must live with his disabling acrophobia. But his resilience and sense of proportion intact, he seems able to cope with the changes in his circumstances and determined to overcome his handicap. As he reluctantly follows Madeleine, he finds his detective's curiosity about this mysterious woman aroused. Curiosity soon turns to fascination and then to passionate love. At this point he is already beginning to lose his objectivity as he desperately tries to rationalize Madeleine's delusional behavior.

After Madeleine's death, he is a broken man, a state he conveys in his scenes in the mental hospital through his dazed expression and total lack of affect. If he seems to have regained a precarious sense of balance after several months of treatment, he begins to lose it as soon as he first spots Judy. As he grows closer to her, he progressively loses control of himself until he has become an emotional juggernaut moving inexorably toward the annihilation of both himself and the object of his love. This idea that external and internal forces could collude in such a way to transform a person's ego into an unstoppable engine of destruction is a chilling one indeed.

By the film's conclusion, Hitchcock has carefully guided us to a place where he is at last able to make the point he has been aiming for all along: the fine distinction between passion and obsession, between real life and dreams, between creation and destruction. The death of Judy at the end makes real the fake suicide that was staged for Scottie's benefit earlier. What began as make-believe has taken on a terrible life of its own and become reality, a reality born of the destructive potential when love overpowers reason.

You might also like:
A Dedicated Man: An Appreciation of James Stewart
The Wrong Man (1956)
I Confess (1953)
Young and Innocent (1937): A Neglected Early Hitchcock Masterwork

This post is part of A Month of VERTIGO at The Lady Eve's REEL LIFE. Click here to learn more about the event and read more posts on Vertigo.

7 comments:

  1. I left you this comment over at Lady Eve's site but am not sure if you saw it as I was rather late to the party, so posting it here too.

    A great posting, R.D. I've only seen this film for the first time in the last few weeks, on the big screen (I didn't know the plot and was on the edge of my seat), and look forward to watching it again on TV and hopefully picking up on some of the elements I didn't completely get first time around. I must agree with you about that dark side to Stewart, such a compelling actor, and also that both he and Novak are excellent, as well as Bel Geddes as Midge. One of the scenes that really sticks in my mind is the one where Midge goes to visit Scottie in hospital and he doesn't even know she is there.

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  2. Thanks for your comment, Judy. I'm glad you were able to see the movie before reading the post, because one of the decisions I made early on was that there was no way I could be coy about crucial parts of the movie and still discuss what I wanted to. I do envy you the experience of seeing "Vertigo" in a theater because it's one of those movies that would be quite a different experience seen that way, especially being immersed in that stunning music. I first saw both "North by Northwest" and "Rear Window" in theaters, and I know that as good as they are at home, seeing them first on the big screen makes an indelible impression.

    About those scenes in the hospital--I was mighty impressed with Stewart. I don't think of him as a physical actor. But that scene, played entirely sitting in a chair, and the 15-minute long sequence where Scottie follows Madeleine in his car, both scenes without any dialogue and Stewart acting only with his facial expressions, show what an accomplished actor Stewart was. I liked Barbara Bel Geddes's cheeky performance too and in fact all of the great supporting actors. I'm definitely looking forward to the upcoming post at REEL LIFE on the supporting actors of "Vertigo."

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  3. Judy, I'm glad you got to see VERTIGO on the big screen, too! My husband and I went to see the restored version of VERTIGO in 1996 when it was playing exclusively at New York City's Ziegfeld Theatre, and it blew us away! (I was pregnant with our daughter at the time, and though she responded to the loud Dolby Sound, I don't think it influenced her otherwise. :-)).

    Your review was superbly written, with many intelligent observations. In particular, I appreciated your specifics about Hitchcock's famous "cattle" remark in regard to actors. I think you nailed it when you explained: "This was perhaps a holdover from his silent days, when facial expressions, body language, and movement were more important than character development and line delivery because the director essentially created the performance visually, through the staging and editing of the film. This is one reason experienced theater actors often found working with Hitchcock such a frustrating experience. Yet for all this, in Vertigo he gets two remarkable performances from his stars." Well-done!

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    1. Dorian, thank you. I think the thing in the movie that caused me to include that comment was the scene where Midge is drawing while having a conversation with Scottie. Her body is poised over her drawing board and doesn't change position; she only moves her eyes a couple of times. In the DVD extras, Barbara Bel Geddes (who was an exprienced stage actress--she was the original Maggie in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof") describes working with Hitckcock and says he would tell her, "Move your eyes in this direction" and that was the only acting she would be doing in a scene. To me it was apparent she was describing that scene at the drawing board.

      About the Dolby sound you mentioned. I couldn't help wondering if the music was really that much louder than the dialogue in the release version. This seems to me something typical of more modern movies. I know when I see the restored version of "North by Northwest" I'm always amazed how washed out the colors seem. Yes, they look more natural. But I saw this movie years ago on the big screen (twice) before its restoration and recall how vivid the colors seemed, to me almost purposefully artificial at times. I recall that Pauline Kael complained about how white Eva Marie Saint's face looked, that the make-up artist had made her face look like "a voodoo mask." I recall that from seeing it in the theater too. But you won't see it in the restoration. Her complexion looks totally natural. I often hear restorers claim they don't change the movie but just restore it to its original state. But I suspect they often make what they see as "improvements" to make the film seem more like contemporary viewers expect it too.

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  4. Perhaps the most powerful and resonant thing about the film is the way Hitchcock uses repetition to emphasize the idea of doubling. Elements in the first part of the film recur later in the film, and elements in the later part of the film mirror those in the first part, giving the film a strange pattern of symmetrical associations. Scottie seeks out places where he saw Madeleine in the beginning of the film and revisits them later in the film: the missions, the florist's shop, the museum, Ernie's restaurant. He watches Judy at her hotel window the same way he watched Madeleine at her hotel window earlier. His transformation of Judy into Madeleine exactly duplicates Elster's transformation of Judy to pass her off as his wife."

    Yes indeed R.D. I couldn't agree with you more. In a film that has probably been discussed more than any other is film history, you still come up with an all-encompassing and passionate piece as as scholarship is exceptional and as prosae is a real joy to read. Yes, Herrmann's themes are inspired by Wagner's 'Tristan' and your entire discussion about how Hitchcock and Taylor mold the events/point of view really turned a great film into a timeless masterpiece, and Hitchcock's finest hour in a career of numerous masterworks. Interestingly, Herrmann's work here was again honored by featuring in the film that will probably win the Best Picture Oscar, THE ARTIST. And like it's original incarnation it's used hauntingly.

    Again, this is a rapturous essay in every sense.

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    1. Sam, thank you so much for your kind comments. I have to admit that when Eve first asked if I was interested in writing on "Vertigo" I had real misgivings. I told her that considering the film's complexity and the amount that has already been written about it, the only movie I could think of that would be more daunting to write about is "Citizen Kane." Once I started, the problem was finding an emphasis that would give what for me would be a manageable length. A false start led to my discarding everything I'd written after the first paragraph and starting over. There's just so much to say about this film. No wonder entire books have been written on it. In any event, in the end I did enjoy writing about "Vertigo" and doing so caused me to view it in a more focused way than I ever have before. So glad you liked the piece.

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  5. Hi R.D.
    "Vertigo" is one of my favorites and I always enjoy reading what others have to say about it. I'm invariably drawn to something I hadn't noticed or appreciated fully. In the case of your terrific post, I like your comments regarding Novak's performance and her creating a fully fleshed-out character in Judy. You call attention to the complexities facing an actress in portraying two characters: one with motivations clouded, the other more clearly expressed. I think she's terrific and really makes the movie for me. I greatly enjoyed your well-informed insights on this very re-watchable film.

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