Vertigo (1958)

Alfred Hitchcock's intensely personal, self-revealing picture, Vertigo, is the story of a man who is possessed by the image of a lost love and becomes increasingly compulsive in his desire to re-create that image. Received reservedly by critics in the year of its release, Vertigo is now generally recognized as one of Hitchcock's greatest films, considered by many to be his masterpiece.

James Stewart plays John "Scottie" Ferguson, a San Francisco police officer. At the film's opening, Scottie loses his footing while chasing a suspect over rooftops, falls, and hangs over the street below, suspended only by a sagging rain gutter. Looking down, he experiences a sense of vertigo brought on by his fear of heights. Trying to pull Scottie to safety, a fellow officer falls to his death, and the incident causes Scottie to quit the force. Scottie spends time with his friend and former fiancée, Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), a no-nonsense, bespectacled artist who designs brassiere advertisements.

A former classmate, shipping magnate Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), asks the ex-policeman to play detective and shadow his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who has begun behaving strangely and self-destructively. Gavin asks Scottie if he believes that "someone dead, someone out of the past, can take possession of a living being." Though Scottie doesn't believe it, he takes the job, tracking his client's wife throughout San Francisco in a sequence that amounts to a nearly silent, Technicolor tour of the city. First, he follows the cool, alluring, gray-suited Madeleine to a flower shop, peeking through the barely open door as she purchases a small bouquet. He trails her to a cemetery where she lays the flowers at the grave of Carlotta Valdes. He then tracks her to a museum where she sits entranced by a portrait of the same Carlotta Valdes. He notices that Madeleine and the painted Carlotta wear the same hairstyle—blonde hair pulled back tightly. He then follows Madeleine to a hotel where he learns that she goes (as "Miss Valdes") every now and then just to sit.

When he goes to find her, Madeleine has mysteriously vanished. Afterwards, Gavin tells Scottie that Madeleine is becoming possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, her great-grandmother. Delving further, Scottie learns that Carlotta went mad after her husband left her and took their child, then killed herself at age twenty-six—Madeleine's age. Attempted suicide While closely following Madeleine, with whom he is becoming increasingly fascinated, Scottie watches as she walks to the edge of the San Francisco Bay—with the Golden Gate Bridge looming huge in the background—and jumps into the water, trying to kill herself. Scottie fishes her out and takes the unconscious woman back to his apartment, where she awakens naked in his bed, her clothes hung to dry. Though romantic and sexual tension fill the air, Madeleine, who does not remember jumping into the bay, leaves while Scottie is distracted by a phone call. She returns to leave him a thank-you note for saving her.

Later, as the two drive around the area together, it appears that Scottie's feelings for Madeleine may be requited—the sequence culminating in a kiss against a background of wild surf. After Scottie has a falling-out with Midge as a result of a particularly bad joke on her part, Madeleine turns up at Scottie's apartment and describes a dream she had. Scottie recognizes the dream's setting as the restored Mexican mission town San Juan Batista, where Carlotta jumped to her death. The two go to San Juan Batista, and they share another kiss in the stable. Nonetheless, Scottie cannot prevent Madeleine from running towards the church to climb to the bell tower. She pulls free from him and runs up the church stairs. Scottie tries to follow but is slowed by his vertigo. Before he can climb any further, he hears a scream and sees Madeleine's body falling past the window, landing with a thud below.

Unable to accept her death or his inability to save her, Scottie flees. A subsequent inquest lays to rest any charges of foul play, establishing that the emotionally disturbed Madeleine killed herself in the belief that she was Carlotta Valdes—but also making it clear that Scottie's vertigo allowed her to do so. Gavin accepts the loss of his wife with dignity. Scottie, however, falls apart and is committed to an asylum. Look-alike After a long period of treatment, he reenters the world, haunting the places where he used to see Madeleine—her house, the museum, Ernie's restaurant—occasionally mistaking blonde, gray-suited women for his dead love. While roaming the hilly San Francisco streets, he spots Judy (also played by Novak), a brunette who bears a striking resemblance to Madeleine, although her rather coarse manner is nothing like that of the enigmatic blonde.

He approaches her, and, although she initially resists, she agrees to go out to dinner with him after hearing something of his sad story. Murder plot revealed An intervening scene showing Judy alone in her room establishes, through flashback, that she is indeed the woman Scottie knew as Madeleine. Preparing to flee before he can see her again, she begins to write him a letter admitting that she was Gavin's lover and was involved in the murder of his wife—the real Madeleine Elster. She agreed to let Gavin dress her and make her up as his wife, to play her role under Scottie's observation, and then to lead him to the bell tower where Gavin, knowing Scottie's vertigo would prevent him from climbing all the way to the top, would push his wife's already-dead body out of the bell tower. The plan worked, but what Judy didn't plan was that she would fall in love with Scottie, who was just supposed to be a pawn in Gavin's game to establish his wife's "suicidal" state. She destroys the note, however, because she cannot bear never to see him again.

Later, as Scottie and Judy have dinner at Ernie's, Scottie stares intensely at this reincarnation of Madeleine, the dead woman's image completely possessing him. He is in love—but not with the real, brunette Judy, only with the ideal she recalls. He buys Judy a gray suit and shoes identical to those Madeleine wore. She feebly protests but loves Scottie too much to resist him, naively hoping to win him on her own. It's all the more painful, therefore, as Scottie grows ever more intent on remaking her in Madeleine's image, psychologically stripping her of her true identity in a ruthless attempt to turn her into the dead woman. She agrees to dye her hair blonde, returning from the hairdresser with her hair at shoulder length, as if making one last attempt to hold on to part of her real self. Scottie insists that she put it up, however, and Judy, willing to do anything just to keep him, comes out of the bathroom looking exactly as Scottie remembers. They kiss, and, as the camera revolves around them, their surroundings blend into the stable at San Juan Batista and then back again.

Later, as Judy gets ready for dinner, having seemingly accepted her fate as the living memory of Scottie's past love, she puts on a necklace. Scottie recognizes it as an heirloom of Carlotta's that belonged to "Madeleine," realizes that Madeleine and Judy are indeed one and the same, and takes her to San Juan Batista to relive her "death." Dragging her into the bell tower, forcing her to admit that it was all a plot, Scottie maniacally interrogates Judy about her relationship with Gavin. Overcoming his vertigo, Scottie drags Judy all the way to the top of the tower, only to discover that he does love her after all, despite everything. The commotion draws the attention of a nun, whose looming shadow frightens the distraught Judy. As Judy recoils in fear, she falls off the edge of the tower to her death. A shocked, destroyed Scottie, having again lost his beloved, perches at the edge and looks down at her dead body—his vertigo gone.

Hitchcock's obsession Based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who also supplied the source material for Henri-Georges Clouzot's thriller Diabolique (1955), Vertigo's story appealed to Hitchcock for reasons that become more apparent in light of the director's own obsessions. Hitchcock tended to become fascinated with the actresses he starred in his films. He chose women whose cool, blonde, sophisticated looks played against their sexuality, including Novak, Grace Kelly, Vera Miles, Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman, and Tippi Hedren, and carefully molded their appearances and actions to comply with his rigid standards of beauty and sexual appeal. Hitchcock had originally planned to film Vertigo with Miles, whom he had groomed for superstardom according to his wont, having wardrobe, hairstyle, and makeup specially created for her and instructing her to wear them off the set as well as during shooting. His efforts went for naught in this case, however. In a published interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock said that Miles, who married after finishing work on his film The Wrong Man (1956), "became pregnant just before the part that was going to turn her into a star. After that I lost interest." He then cast Novak: "I went to Kim Novak's dressing room and told her about the dresses and hairdos that I had been planning for several months."

Vertigo is about just such attempts to realize an ideal image and to capture an illusion, using its main character's obsessive pathology to convey this theme. When the seemingly normal hero, who has become warped in his desire for a woman who never really existed, screams, "Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you exactly what to do and what to say?" he might easily be referring not to the murderer who set him up, but to himself and to Hitchcock—the master who obsessively trained his pupil-actresses. In Vertigo, Hitchcock reveals himself to his audience, embodying, in Stewart's character, his own obsessions and desire to make women over. Novak's character, moreover, is an actress of sorts, a woman whose role-playing assists one man (Gavin/the director) in captivating another (Scottie/the viewer).

Although Scottie is the main character, Novak's role—that of a woman who feels compelled to deny her own identity and allow herself to be degraded in order to please the men who ask her to play a part—is equally intriguing. What both Scottie and Hitchcock look for in their perfect woman is the erotic, carnal female disguised within the gray suit and pinned-back hair. Scottie (and Hitchcock) are unattracted to Bel Geddes' frank Midge, who clearly lacks feminine mystique, even going so far as to compare the mechanics of a bra to those of a cantilevered bridge. Madeleine, by contrast, is never as forthcoming and is all the more exciting because of it. In fact, when she tries to reveal something of her real self (as Judy) to Scottie, he resists her, becoming all the more determined in his obsessive confusion of illusion and reality.

Hitchcock's revelation of the murder plot midway through the film deepens our psychological understanding of the romantic dynamics. By suddenly freeing us from Scottie's point of view (with which we have identified up to this point), Hitchcock allows us to study his quixotic fixation in an objective light that reveals its hopelessness, at the same time letting us sympathize with Judy, who becomes the victim of romantic idealization. As Hitchcock pointed out, Scottie's pursuit of the image becomes a "form of necrophilia." It also makes him, like the character he played in Hitchcock's immediately preceding Rear Window (1954), a voyeur who observes and imagines rather than acts in the real world.

One of Vertigo's most telling, and disturbing, scenes in this respect occurs after Scottie has pulled the unconscious Judy from the water, and she wakes up nude in his apartment, her clothes hanging up to dry. Since she could not have undressed herself, Scottie obviously undressed and viewed the image of his desire while she was unconscious. In reality, however, Judy's suicidal trance was all part of the scheme to hook Scottie, which means that her attempted drowning was an act too—we learn later that she is an excellent swimmer—and that she was merely pretending to be unconscious when Scottie undressed her and put her in bed.

Later, when Scottie really does lose his ideal image to death, he can no longer function (Hitchcock, when losing Miles to marriage and pregnancy, said about filming Vertigo, "I lost interest, I couldn't get the rhythm going with her again") and must re-create her in the new Judy. The person under the disguise means nothing to him, however; all that matters is that she look and act like the ideal woman. Because Scottie is more concerned with loving an image than with loving a person, this image is taken away from him at the film's end. A happy ending to his dilemma is not possible.

The film was not a box-office hit in 1958, but over the years it has come to be regarded as a Hitchcock classic. With the rise of the auteur theory and interest in directors' lives and careers (along with a number of books delving into Hitchcock's dark side), Vertigo has come to be regarded as a great work of art that, more than any other Hitchcock film, gives the audience a sense of who the director really is.

It is also a masterpiece of filmmaking technique, including one of cinema's most important innovations—the dolly-out, zoom-in shot that visually represents Scottie's sensation of vertigo. As Hitchcock told Truffaut, "I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me." Although he first attempted to visualize this sensation in Rebecca (1940), Hitchcock was dissatisfied with the effect and continued to think about the problem for fifteen years. For the vertigo effect in the bell tower (and elsewhere in the film), he finally hit upon the idea of dollying the camera away from the stairs (which meant physically pulling the camera away) while simultaneously zooming the lens in on them. When presenting the idea to his crew, Hitchcock was told it would cost $50,000, "because to put the camera at the top of the stairs [they had] to have a big apparatus to lift it, counterweight it, and hold it up in space." Since there were no characters in the shot, Hitchcock asked, "Why can't we make a miniature of the stairway and lay it on its side, then take our shot by pulling away from it?" The resulting shot, which cost $19,000 to produce, is unique to Hitchcock and completely new to film.

Cast:

Performer, Character

James Stewart, John "Scottie" Ferguson

Kim Novak, Madeleine Elster/Judy Barton

Barbara Bel Geddes, Midge

Tom Helmore, Gavin Elster

Henry Jones, Coroner

Raymond Bailey, Doctor

Production Credits:

Producer, Alfred Hitchcock

Director, Alfred Hitchcock

Screenwriter, Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor (based on the novel D'Entre les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac)

Editor, George Tomasini

Cinematographer, Robert Burks

Composer, Bernard Herrmann

Special Effects, John P. Fulton, Farciot Edouart, and Wallace Kelly