cineSOURCE magazine

Why Me: An Investigation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo
by Davell Swan

James Stewart ponders his Hitchcockian predecessors' painful falls, Bay Bridge in background. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock

Warning: This is not a date movie!

Note: Movie info at bottom.

Note: For the full effect of this article, read the rest of the four part series, CineSource's "Vertigo" Investigations Parts 2, 3 and 4:
• Vertigo: The Underworld Descent (Feb, 2012)
• Vertigo: The Search Goes On (Jun, 2012)
• Vertigo IV: Doom Or Happiness? (Sep, 2012)

A San Francisco Police Department detective, John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart), develops vertigo while hanging from a collapsing drainpipe and watching his cop buddy fall screaming to the street below. He then imagines a series of events, similar to what happens in "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" (1962, from the 1891 story by Ambrose Bierce), which could also fill a two-hour film, until he falls to his death. Or not.

He miraculously escapes, resigns from the police force and apparently receives a large payout. An old friend appears, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), with a detective assignment that involves a wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), whose suicidal tendencies are supposedly driven by the spirit of her dead great grandmother, Carlotta Valdes. Scottie falls in love with Mad and she with him.

Unfortunately, to say the least, she's not actually Elster's wife, but his mistress, the unbelievably crass Judy Barton. She plans to stage a suicide via a fall from the San Juan Bautista bell tower (South of Gilroy) that the detective is powerless to halt, due to his vertigo; he will, however, be able to function as a witness to this fall. In actuality, Elster throws the fairly fresh corpse of his real wife, neck broken, off the tower, while Judy stops pretending to be Madeleine and disappears from Scottie's life.

The all-powerful director advises Kim Novak, perhaps with a comment along the lines of his famous dictum, 'Actors are like cattle,' on an oddly rural San Francisco street. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock

Thinking Mad has died, Scottie develops acute melancholia with a guilt syndrome. About a year later, wandering San Francisco, still in a daze, he visits the places where they spent time, finding women whom he vaguely scares, thinking they might be her. He accidentally comes across Judy, still in the city because she was dumped by Elster after he inherited his wife's loot. She's a dead ringer for Mad, but is a trite shop girl. Not realizing she "played" Madeleine, he laboriously turns her back into some semblance of Mad and they are both happy.

That is until he discovers her real identity and finally figures out the plot. He takes Judy back to the tower. This time he's able to climb to the top, while dragging the resisting Judy with him, and his vertigo is cured. A happy ending, except that a nun appears and scares Judy, who actually does fall to her death. Scottie stands there and looks at her body on the roof below. An open ending—we have no idea what becomes of Scottie.

Behind the intro credits, Hitchcock's camera inspects Kim Novak's face like a cop looking at a mug shot. In extreme CU, we see her cheek, her lips, which change expression; and then tilt up to and past the nose. Then, both eyes, looking away nervously. Now, a shot of the right eye, we move in much too close as it turns a threatening red. It opens uncomfortably wide, and an evil chord, thanks to Herrmann's exquisite score, reveals that the eye's a giant creeping monster from outer space. Or, that this is a surrealistic monster movie but the monsters are human.

Stewart hauling Novak out of the San Francisco Bay; for the closeup, Hitch had her jump repeatedly fully clothed into the studio dunk tank. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock

Like the spiral circling out of this horrible eye, “Vertigo” relentlessly spirals ever deeper within, repeating itself, like a black hole, sucking all light and life away. Our hero follows the other characters into the dark. He's compromised in every way, and his metaphysical underpinnings, his personal reality, are stolen.

Hitchcock's films tend to pivot on the dialectics of freedom, intelligence, capability, bravery, power and strength versus the lack thereof; indeed, the terms "freedom" and "power" are specifically used by characters here. With “Vertigo”, there's the addition of “The Past and Old Things” versus “The Present and Contemporary Objects”.

There's an unusually powerful—even for Hitchcock—sexual and romantic basis to this film. All of the characters, except the “Big Monster”, Gavin Elster, are in great need of a loving relationship. In connection with this, and possibly to confound overly-intellectual critics, the film is jam-packed with both phallic and female symbology. There are artistic pencils and brushes, columns, bars of every possible type and many trees, along with feminine "portals" and open circles galore. This is the second Hitchcock film that begins with Jimmy Stewart in some kind of constricting contrivance related to an injury, the other being 1954's "Rear Window". This time it's a corset and, as before, he has an itch, physically and conceptually, possibly to his detriment.

“Vertigo” begins with Scottie as a hard-headed, skeptical and pragmatic police detective. As with the David Hemmings character in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow Up" (1966), Scottie's professional belief system is the basis of everything he understands, and if that's undermined he can no longer cope. Like the life guard in Hitchcock's "To Catch A Thief" (1955) a man grabs a bar and chins himself then runs across a roof.

Novak, wearing the necklace of her diseased great-grandmother, comes on strong to Stewart at the hotel. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock

With a pan left, across the SF skyline, there's the supremely symbolic, in name and shape, Coit Tower. Flashing background neon recalls the view from the apartment window Hitchcock featured in "Rope" (1948). A cop runs after the man and Scottie is behind him. The cop barely makes a jump, but Scottie misses it to find himself hanging on to a loose gutter, as precarious as the coat sleeve Fry grasps in “Saboteur” (Hitchcock, 1942), before his fall from the Statue Of Liberty. The officer reaches for Scottie's hand but falls himself, and lands in a spiral-configuration.

We now find Scottie in Midge's (Barbara Bel Geddes) apartment. They were engaged for a short time, and though "there's nobody else" for her, she called off the nuptials after realizing his lack of interest. Her home is contemporary in style, furniture and art. She drives a cute VW Kharman Ghia, with curved fender sculpture suggestive of femininity. Midge is a fine artist by training but makes a living drawing bras.

Scottie bemoans his acrophobia, the cause of his fear of heights, bringing on the vertigo. His Freudian cane is pointed around the room and he aims it at the strapless bra Midge has hanging on her easel. Midge responds: "Works on the principle of the cantilevered bridge" (another symbol). He uses the cane as a representation of a desk, recalling the masculine bar at the beginning. "How's your love life Midge?" he asks, as she waves her long pencil against her drawing board, finishing a sketch of a brassiere.

Beginning with “The Lodger” (1926/27), the first project considered to have risen to the level of true Hitchcockery, officers-of-the-law have often been portrayed as, at best, misguided. In “The Lodger”, the police detective Joe arrogantly detains the first "wrong man", a new boarder at his blonde fiancé Daisy's home. Soon, the innocent closely approaches a nasty demise by way of an enraged mob, while the cop loses Daisy to him. In “Notorious” (1946) Cary Grant pimps his love, Ingrid Bergman, to the Nazi Claude Rains.

The amazingly modern poster for 'Vertigo' appropriately symbolizes its structure, collapsing inward spirals. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock

In “Vertigo”, somehow Scottie trumps both the above by agreeing to the strangely-named Gavin Elster's preposterous plan for him to follow his wandering wife. Having met the old college pal in his nostalgically-furnished ship building office, Scottie overlooks Elster's unctuous attitude. No doubt the surprisingly lewd, long jockeying cranes outside the magnate's picture window, are an indication of our detective's main concern.

“Vertigo” (1958), Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Produced By Alfred Hitchcock/ Alfred J Hitchcock Productions/ Paramount Pictures, Screenplay by Samuel A. Taylor and Alec Coppel, Score by Bernard Herrmann, Director of Photography: Robert Burks, Costume Design: Edith Head, Editor: George Tomasini

This is the first of a two-part article. And thanks to Joseph Jordan who has given me a stack of Hitchcock books over the last year, many of which I rely on for these articles.
Posted on Nov 11, 2011 - 10:21 AM