Vertigo (1958)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor

Based on the novel D'entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac

Cast: James Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson; Kim Novak as Madeleine Elster; Tom Helmore as Gavin Elster; Barbara Bel Geddes as Marjorie "Midge" Wood

 

Vertigo was once a critically maligned film from Alfred Hitchcock only to grow into one of his most critically lauded, so much so it knocked off Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) from the top spot of the Sight & Sound magazine poll for greatest film ever made in 2012. That was not exactly an easy achievement to have completed when Citizen Kane was number one before it for five plus decade, and the fact Vertigo has gained this stature is both an achievement but also strange for me when viewing the film. Vertigo is a true one-off deserving to have done this, but it is a difficult film to digest, one which is possible to criticise for being too languid, too obvious and at times too stripped of Hitchcock's precise, expert filmmaking, even having something the director himself considered a plot flaw in how reliant the protagonist’s acrophobia would be for the plot the succeed¹. It is also justifiable to champion, even if it involves digging into his own psyche at the same time as a filmmaker, for how alien, disquieting and hypnotic as a film it is. The premise is one perfect for a Hitchcock thriller: when he develops acrophobia and vertigo at heights, San Francisco detective John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) is forced to retire from his career, but is asked by an old friend to follow his wife Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) under the belief she has been possessed by one of her late ancestors. The results of taking this job lead to Scotty becoming detached from reality chasing after a woman he falls in love with, one who might not be all she seems. This however leads to a very different result, an unnerving melodrama with vaguely Gothic tinges.

You have to accept a lot of poetic license. That Scotty's vertigo is a MacGuffin. That a major plot twist is shown earlier than it would in any other film, and very obvious if you are attuned to these types of plots, turning the rest of the movie into a type of psycho-dramatic character piece that roots itself into a direction detached from the rational. If you "get" Vertigo's tone and appreciate its crafted elegance, however, it is an unnerving film about psychological breakdown and neurosis, the plot crux more to do with the emotions of two characters, Scottie and Madeleine, who become more emotionally disconnected from reality and pull the rest of the film with them into their heightened worlds. For the moments of lightness that take place, screwball comedy with Scottie's friend and ex-fiancée Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), who still loves him, most of the film is connected to Scottie almost entirely, onscreen for most of the film in the centre during his descent into dark obsession.  When the film shifts to its second half, the already mentioned plot twist which would usually happen at the end of another thriller is suddenly revealed halfway through with half the film left, leaving Vertigo in uncharted waters where one is disturbed by Scottie's increasingly erratic behaviour after he is briefly hospitalised.

Passages of Hitchcock's career have this film's tone, an odd supernatural or psychological murkiness. Rebecca (1940) is an obvious cornerstone of supernatural melodrama, even Under Capricorn (1949) expressing his interest into slow burn dramas based on hidden neurosis. However even the dream sequence in Spellbound (1945) is safeguarded by the fact, despite being designed by Salvador Dali, that it is a dream whilst Vertigo, despite also having a dream sequence, is entirely in the vague and mysterious. In Vertigo the characters are drawn along narratively by emotions and unseen forces, not elaborate plots of other Hitchcock films, locations such as flower shops, woodlands and a mission called Mission San Juan Bautista all becoming imbued with ghosts of many forms, literally in an image at the ending in the bell tower of the mission. The use of striking colour especially adds to this. Made in the height of Hollywood's Technicolor era, the film is striking in its aesthetic and use of San Francisco locations, but it is especially when you get to the interiors this stands out. Those scenes emphasises the ghostly air from the red walls of a restaurant that is repeatedly entered by the characters and the reoccurrence of the colour green in the second half which purges the world into a sickly obsessive form. It is a deeply perverse film in its themes, carefully dictated by Stewart and Novak, between them managing to keep the film's tone in the right groove, despite the visible age difference, Stewart able to switch himself from the stereotypically jovial and charming man he is seen as in cinema to someone almost shell shocked or a walking comatose, while Novak also has to juggle a complicated role when the film pans out in the end.

Shot in said lush Technicolor by director of photography Robert Burks, a regular collaborator with Hitchcock into the early sixties, Vertigo is as much able to work because the aesthetic of classic Hollywood that the story is depicted through, especially when this takes the studio system style of Hollywood, always evoking for me the sense of the elaborate and stylish, literally the "Dream Factory" creating dreamy films even when shot on location, and undercut it with this tale of obsession. The rear-screen projection for actors driving cars to the colour palettes now become unintentional tools for creating heightened dreams, here becoming more and more unsettling as this narrative of a love for a construct continues. The San Francisco locations, especially the gorgeous panoramas of the sprawling metropolis, add a sense of scale, keeping a Gothic tone for the plot but setting it in a modernist urban environment. Another big contribution to the film is Bernard Hermann's orchestral score, the drama contained in it solidifying the characters' emotions as a lush but far-from-generic score, adding further to the mysterious air surrounding all Scottie encounters and does. That it can switch from the legitimately romantic to the disturbed, and you can pick up the difference in the orchestral instruments and the notes they play, is evidence of its success as a score.

The most openly unconventional aspects of Vertigo are specially created animated sequences. The first is the opening credits by Saul Bass, the title emerging from a woman's eye in extreme close-up, the very modern design of Bass' work for Hitchcock still to this day incredible for their craft but also unique compared to modern title designs still, the use of colour and shape. They become almost avant-garde especially as the credits do not portray anything that takes place in the movie but sets up an unnerving mood it has. The other is the mid-film dream sequence designed by abstract artist John Ferren that takes the same route, flower petals spiralling outward and a figure falling into the void, one of the most iconic images of Hitchcock's career being James Steward's disembodied head staring straight at the viewer which comes from this sequence. It is an iconic image as he is sucked into a mental abyss of his own psyche that he is chained to for the rest of the narrative. It aptly sets up the emotional shock, in the series of events that set up the second half, which will turn Scottie drastically.

Barring its style, including the innovative depiction of Scottie's vertigo, a distortion of our perception as well as his as it is always in first person, cinematic space growing in size without any seemingly actual movement, the rest of the film's unconventional tone is internal. Alfred Hitchcock was a Hollywood director who made commercial films, his auteurism coming from how clear and involved in their craft he was from the get-go of each production, but Vertigo does reach its tendrils into the expressionistic, with its languid pace, in that it is all induced and affected by its characters' minds. When it gets to the second half as Scottie meets another woman similar to Madeleine, the ghosts of the first half change from historical ones to psychological baggage of sexual and gender issues. About a man's memory and view of others becoming distorted and affected as he tries to control and groom this second woman to be Madeleine, Hitchcock was completely blunt about the sexual meaning of this in his interviews with Francois Truffaut, even going as far as say that Scottie was “indulging in a form of necrophilia”², but there is as well the notion of idealism and how it can become poisoned is noticeable. It also cannot be denied that, to an uncomfortable degree after this with his problematic history with Tippi Hedren, Hitchcock himself had blatantly obvious fixations on the idealised woman, and whether he can be defended as an artist for this or not, Vertigo becomes a text unintentionally, but with greater weight, in seeing obsession as a concept for the perfect woman be dissected by its plot.

[Spoiler warning. Skip italicized text if you do not want the film to be spoilt for you]

Adding to this is knowing the woman Scottie is obsessed with is a mere image, a fake stand-in for his friend's real wife in a twist Italian giallo filmmakers would have ran with. The woman he loves manages to die twice in fact, his love only existing for the form of Madeleine, wearing a certain flower, a certain way to their blonde hair style tied up in the back, a certain grey suit dress designed for the film by Edith Head, and an image created based on the real wife, the individual Kim Novak's character actually is and Carlotta Valdes, the ancestor Madeleine is said to be possessed by, amalgamated together. The image of femininity he adored is a mere picture, while the stand-in who promises to love him is rejected for admitting how she is not the Madeleine he wanted and that she was used to trick him into a murder scheme. The "abstract" I am obsessed with in cinema, how I use the word, is as much about the questioning of subjective reality, and the theme of Vertigo of an idealised image, a beautiful woman, being both impossible to be reach and not even existing is a good example of this type of questioning, when the symbols of femininity for Scottie not the woman herself is what he desires. As an entertainment film, this makes the film a cautious tale of this obsession, and that the film is as languid as it is befits this.

[Spoiler ends]

Whilst there would be a film later on which is stranger than this in tone - The Birds (1963) even as a monster film is more stranger and chilling in the baggage it evokes - Vertigo is haunting as an entertainment feature, and as art, because its conceit is about the image one has overtaking reality as Scotty is chasing after a phantom in many a sense. This comes with mind as I have had to gradually warm to Vertigo over the times I have seen it. It does meander significantly halfway through, noticeably slower in pace to other Hitchcock films, and that makes it a film whose acclaim is fascinating in that it shows visible flaws in plotting and pacing that cannot be denied. It possesses something which overcomes this, even if it is unnerving, even before the Sight & Sound polls, back when the film was not readily available to see, causing someone like Brian De Palma to openly riff on the same theme of perception in Obsession (1976), the title spelling out the themes openly. Film critics dug into this film when it was more readily available to see, and what virtues the film has - its performances, the music, the aesthetic style - make what would be a hammy melodrama at points in another's hands enticing as it is disconcerting.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist / Mind Bender/ Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

 

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1) Truffaut, François (1985). Hitchcock/Truffant, Revised Edition. First Touchstone Book Edition. Pg. 247.

2) Truffaut, François (1985). Hitchcock/Truffant, Revised Edition. First Touchstone Book Edition. Pg. 244.