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“Vertigo,” considered director Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece by many cineastes, turns 50 today.
The landmark film, which stars Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes, hit U.S. screens on May 9, 1958.
I discovered this mystery about a man with a fear of heights who unwittingly falls in love while being entangled in an elaborate murder scheme on VHS in about 1986, just after Universal put it back in circulation. It and four other Hitchcock pictures had been unshown for 20 years, but this was all beyond my information realm at the time. I was 9 and just realizing that Hitchcock had done more than host suspense anthology “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” (which the earlier “Alfred Hitchock Presents” had morphed into). I’d become addicted to the show on Saturday nights on cable’s USA Network.
Watching “Vertigo” late one night with my parents I found it strangely terrifying. Seems a bit odd now — unlike “Psycho,” “Vertigo” has no blood, spooky old house, maniac on the loose or mummified discoveries in the cellar. Even then I couldn’t quite pinpoint why “Vertigo” disturbed me, but then neither can I explain now why I keep returning to it.
Why do I have spiral sketches from Saul Bass’s masterful credit sequence and a still of the Portrait of Carlotta on my desk? I’m certainly not frightened by “Vertigo” and yet that initial viewing turned out to be rather life altering.
“Vertigo” haunted me the same way Catholic Church imagery haunted me as a child — 17th and 18th Century art, large churches and foreboding graveyards, plus deserted missions whose only inhabitants seem to be grim reaper nuns who appear like phantoms out of nowhere. Bernard Herrmann’s brilliant score clearly upped the emotional ante.
So much of that first experience seems absurd now. “Vertigo’s” initial theme (which — plot spoilers ahead — turns out to be an elaborate hoax) of a woman who’s possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother struck my fundamentalist Christian parents as a smidge too close to demonic possession territory and there was talk of ejecting it.
Thankfully wisdom prevailed and we continued (to this day, I can picture where we were sitting in the room and my parents’ comments when it was over. My father’s knee-jerk take: “[Stewart] kinda got the raw end of the deal” — an understatement for the ages).
Eventually we got a second VCR, so I re-rented it and dubbed an illegal copy showing it to friends (videotapes were ridiculously expensive in those days — now you can’t give them away). My puberty-era pals seemed to regard it as an interesting-enough murder mystery, but little more.
I’d fully grasped the plot twists on first viewing but was always curious to gauge my friends’ reaction to the flashback scene in which Stewart’s character discovers it wasn’t Kim Novak’s character who went plunging out the window of the mission tower at San Juan Batista. Childhood pal David’s first thought was that Elster had thrown a dummy. When my ex-boyfriend Brent saw Judy slipping into flashback mode his first thought was that Scottie’s vertigo was somehow contagious and Judy had caught it. (This scene has always been controversial. It essentially gives the movie's secret away before the final act.)
I didn’t know anyone, though, who seemed to be as fascinated by the movie as I was (Brent, to this day, hates it — it’s his least-favorite Hitchcock by far).
I ended up writing papers on it in college. I analyzed the dream sequence for a class on cultural semiotics. Herrmann’s score provided fodder for a music history class analysis. Naturally I was beside myself with euphoria in 1996 when I learned cinematic saviors Robert Harris and James Katz had painstakingly restored the film, the original negative of which had deteriorated substantially.
Setting my emotional attachment aside, I realize it’s a curious little picture. Who would concoct as elaborate a ruse as Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to murder his wife?
It seems about as plausible as George and Martha’s wildly improbable deal to pretend they have a son and carry on as if he’s a real person in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” As with Elster’s murder plan, this is ludicrously absurd.
And the only plausible explanation for what many have pointed to as a “Vertigo” plot hole is that Ellen Corby’s hotel owner is in on the plan with Elster and Judy and plays along by telling Scottie that “Madeline,” who rents a room from her, hasn’t been in that day (Scottie followed her there and saw her go in). What did Elster tell the owner? That it was a practical joke? A real gas, eh?
“Vertigo,” clearly, is not a movie whose power is evoked through plausibility. In fact, its utter improbability, along with its misty San Francisco landscapes, undoubtedly adds to its dreamy aesthetic, for that’s what “Vertigo” ultimately is — a dream that occasionally slips into nightmare mode.
More literally, it’s a dream because it’s that rarest of films — a project where all the pistons fired and every element not only worked individually but coalesced into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Stewart’s performance showed he could do more than the gosh-golly-shucks routine. If Kim Novak’s scenes as Madeline seem limited, compare them to how natural she is as Judy and consider how awkward a gal like Judy (a shop girl, not an actress) would feel having to pretend to be someone she’d never met. It would be a hideously uncomfortable situation, having to ramble on to Scottie about elaborate phony trance experiences sketched out in precise detail by Elster.
And is there a finer character actress than the late Barbara Bel Geddes (I’d loved her previously as “Dallas’” Miss Ellie)? Her Midge gives “Vertigo” its only comic relief and yet the scene in which she walks out of the sanitarium — Hitchcock holds the shot almost perversely long — is heartbreakingly sad.
Perhaps we gay men relate to Midge so well because we’ve all been in her shoes — pining away, at some point (more often than I’d care to admit), for a man we know we can never have (either because he’s straight or gay but just not feeling it for us). And if we don’t relate to Midge, we at least understand her. Though Scottie’s unequivocally straight (even in San Francisco!), she furnishes him with a sort of fag hag/gal pal, an unequivocal part of the gay experience.
But …. I’ve digressed.
Perhaps my “Vertigo” fixation, as with any obsession, is impossible to fully explain. As with Scottie’s obsession with Madeline, it just is.
Joey DiGuglielmo considers the phenomenon of the Hitchcock blonde here.
 Posted by Joey DiGuglielmo,
Washington Blade News Editor | May. 9 at
3:14 PM | JDiGuglielmo@washblade.com
Permalink: http://www.washblade.com/blog/index.cfm?blog_id=18216
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