There’s entertainment, then there’s art. A work can be both, one or the other, or neither. Recently, I’ve written about entertainment while reviewing movies such as, “The Hangover,” “The Taking of Pelham 123,” and “The Proposal.” This week I present to you a film that, though entertaining, is a staggering work of art.
If, like me, you find the entertainments at your local Cineplex mostly lacking, then thank God for DVD and digital download, and re-watch one of the greatest movies ever made.
Alfred Hitchcock was a master—a genius with a rare talent that garnered him both commercial and critical success, a true artist who worked within the studio system and entertained the masses. His work includes some of the greatest, most extraordinary films ever made. But the master’s masterpiece is unquestionably “Vertigo.”
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen this extraordinary film (probably close to 30 times), but my most recent screening was in high definition thanks to Apple TV, and it was stunning.
I think a convincing case can be made that “Vertigo” is the greatest, most flawless film ever made, but even critics and scholars unwilling to go that far, say it’s in some very elite company.
Truth is, you can’t go wrong with any Hitchcock flick, particularly those from the 40s and 50s, beginning with “Saboteur” and ending with “Marnie.” There are so many remarkable films from this period, including “Suspicion,” “Spellbound,” “Shadow of a Doubt,” “Notorious,” “Strangers on a Train,” “I Confess,” “Rear Window,” “North by Northwest,” “Psycho,” and “The Birds.”
Stop and think about it for a moment. Those are some of the very best the art of cinema has to offer, and they were all made by this one amazing artist and the collaborators he assembled, but as amazing as all of Hitchcock’s films are, “Vertigo” is singular, peerless, surpassing even his own astonishing achievements.
Based on the French novel “D’Entre Les Morts” (From Among the Dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the script for “Verito” was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, though like all his movies, Hitch’s hand can be seen here, as well.
John "Scottie" Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) is a retired San Francisco police detective who suffers from acrophobia and Madeleine is the lady who leads him to high places. A wealthy shipbuilder who is an acquaintance from college days approaches Scottie and asks him to follow his beautiful wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak). He fears she is going insane, maybe even contemplating suicide, because she believes she is possessed by a dead ancestor. Scottie is skeptical, but agrees after he sees the beautiful Madeleine.
After rescuing Madeleine from a leap into San Francisco Bay, he becomes obsessed with her. Later, when, because of his vertigo, he is unable to save her a second time, he becomes obsessed with recreating her—and he thinks he’s found just the girl for the part, a redhead from Kansas named Judy.
“Vertigo” is a character-driven story about lost, wandering people—physically restless, spiritually rootless, whose fatal pursuit of an elusive romantic ideal opens them up to exploitation and ultimately emptiness.
The sometime criticism that “Vertigo” is too slow is unfair and unfounded. After the fast chase of the opening, the film begins a slow chase, a long fluid, vertiginous,
dreamlike pursuit of something that doesn’t exist, and how could it be otherwise?
From the opening credit sequence to the final image, “Vertigo” is a downward spiral, a long, nightmarish, free fall in one of America’s most vertical cities, San Francisco.
Hypnotic and haunting, every aspect of “Vertigo” is affecting—from the script to wardrobe to set design (notice all the reds and greens representing the stop and go of vertigo, the fear of falling and the simultaneous desire to) to Bernhard Herrmann’s pitch perfect soundtrack, and most of all, the performances, particularly that of Jimmy Stewart, who’s an underrated dramatic actor with the ability to go to very dark places.
The above excellence is due to the director. All these facets of film were shepherded into being. No one has ever come close to matching Hitchcock’s genius in both quality and quantity, and I honestly don’t believe anyone ever will.
The auteur theory, which posits that the director is the “author” of a film, applies to Hitch more than any other Hollywood studio filmmaker in history—and he is more the author of “Vertigo” than any other of his pictures.
Like any work of art, it’s reductive to say that “Vertigo” is about anything. In a way, it, like all inspired works of art, is about everything (and nothing). But of all its themes, of all that it explores, for me the most devastating is doomed romanticism—the obsessive desire to possess a projected fantasy, the dangerous denial of reality in order to recreate again and again an illusion.
Listen to this haunting exchange:
Judy: Couldn't you like me, just me the way I am? When we first started out, it was so good; we had fun. And . . . and then you started in on the clothes. Well, I'll wear the darn clothes if you want me to, if, if you'll just, just like me.
Scottie: The color of your hair . . .
Judy: Oh, no!
Scottie: Judy, please, it can't matter to you.
Judy: If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?
Scottie: Yes. Yes.
Judy: All right. All right then, I'll do it. I don't care anymore about me.
Have more sad, tragic, pathetic words ever been penned—“If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?”
This exchange calls to mind “the girl” in Hemingway’s brilliant “Hills Like White Elephants,” who being bullied into an abortion by her American lover, says, “Then I’ll do it because I don’t care about me anymore.”
The notion of self-annihilation in order to be loved is so outlandish, so counterintuitive, yet on display around us every day.
How often have our lovers tried to change us? How often have we let them, hoping like Judy, that if we do they’ll finally love us?
It’s not love, of course, which only gives and accepts. In fact, it’s the antithesis of love—selfish, conditional, abusive. As Donald Spotto writes, “Perhaps never have exploitation (disguised as love) and self-annihilation (disguised as self-sacrifice) been so tragically presented in film . . . it amounts to the very definition of false love—a passion which is narcissistic on the one hand and neurotically self-destructive on the other.”
In an example of masterful audience manipulation that equals his use of it in “Psycho,” Hitch has us resent Scottie’s friend when she attempts to break the spell by mocking the fantasy, and by getting us to desire Judy’s transformation into Madeleine nearly as much as Scottie—tell me it doesn’t bother you when, returning from the salon, Judy’s hair is the color of Madeleine’s, but not the style.
As in “Rear Window,” Jimmy Stewart as Scottie Ferguson, is Hitch’s stand-in, but instead of being a photographer seeing everything through the removed view of a camera lens, this time he’s an obsessed director turning a woman into the woman—Hitch’s ideal blonde remade over and over again through Ingrid Bergman, Anne Baxter, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Janet Leigh, Tippi Hedren, and this time, Kim Novak. It’s a haunting example of art imitating life imitating art.
“Vertigo” is a film of authenticity and grandeur, a flawless masterpiece where every single element—every single one—works together perfectly to cast a spell we remain under long after the final shot of Scottie standing on the bell tower, arms spread out, drained, devastated, death-haunted .
People often speak of being disillusioned as a bad thing, but nothing could be further from the truth. Illusions are destructive. Losing them, though often painful, is healthy, loving, freeing. “Vertigo” shows this so purely, so clearly, so unsentimentally, yet compassionately. We can destroy our illusions or be destroyed by them.
I end this piece with the final words of this devastating film: “God have mercy,” for it is my deep conviction that whether we rid ourselves of our narcissistic obsessions and precious illusions or cling to them in vertiginous self-destruction, she absolutely will.
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