| Vertigo | |
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original poster by Saul Bass |
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| Directed by | Alfred Hitchcock |
| Produced by | Alfred Hitchcock |
| Written by | Alec Coppel Samuel A. Taylor |
| Story by | Pierre Boileau Thomas Narcejac |
| Starring | James Stewart Kim Novak Barbara Bel Geddes |
| Music by | Bernard Herrmann |
| Cinematography | Robert Burks |
| Editing by | George Tomasini |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures (1983-present) |
| Release date(s) | May 9, 1958 |
| Running time | 128 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $2,479,000 |
| Box office | $7,311,013 |
Vertigo is a 1958 psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Barbara Bel Geddes. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor, based on the 1954 novel D'entre les morts by Boileau-Narcejac.
It is the story of a retired police detective suffering from acrophobia who is hired as a private investigator to follow the wife of an acquaintance to uncover the mystery of her peculiar behavior.
The film received mixed reviews upon initial release, but has garnered acclaim since and is now frequently ranked among the greatest films ever made, and often cited as a classic Hitchcock film and one of the defining works of his career.[1]
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After an incident where his latent acrophobia results in the death of an officer, detective John "Scottie" Ferguson retires, spending much of his time with his ex-fiancée Midge Wood. Scottie tries to gradually conquer his fear but Midge suggests another severe emotional shock might be the only cure.
An acquaintance, Gavin Elster, asks Scottie to tail his wife, Madeleine, claiming she has been possessed; Scottie reluctantly agrees. Next day Scottie follows Madeleine to a florist for a bouquet of flowers; next she visits the grave of Carlotta Valdes; then she visits an art museum where she sits watching Portrait of Carlotta, a painting of a woman resembling her. Lastly, she enters the McKittrick Hotel but when Scottie investigates she is missing and the clerk insists she has not been there.
Midge takes Scottie to a local history expert who informs them Carlotta Valdes tragically ended her life with suicide. Another visit with Gavin reveals Carlotta is Madeleine's great-grandmother and who Gavin fears is possessing Madeleine. Gavin also says Madeleine has no knowledge of Carlotta. Scottie tails Madeleine to Fort Point, where she suddenly leaps into San Francisco Bay. Scottie rescues Madeleine and takes her to his home. The meeting is tense and leads to a strange intimacy between them but after a phone call Madeleine quickly leaves.
The next day Scottie follows her to his house and they decide to spend the day together because Scottie fears Madeleine might commit suicide. The two travel to Muir Woods where Madeleine, embarrassed from confessing that her dreams sound mad, runs to the ocean and they kiss. Upon hearing the details of her nightmare Scottie identifies the setting as Mission San Juan Bautista and takes Madeleine there where they proclaim their love for each other. Madeleine suddenly runs into the church and up the bell tower. Scottie, halted on the steps by vertigo and paralyzing fear, watches as Madeleine plunges to her death.
An inquest declares Madeleine's death a suicide but Scottie feels ashamed his weakness has rendered him incapable of preventing someone's death. Gavin does not fault Scottie but in the following weeks Scottie becomes depressed. While treated in a sanatorium, he becomes mute, haunted by vivid nightmares. Although Midge visits, his condition remains the same. After release, Scottie haunts the places that Madeleine visited, often imagining that he sees her. One day, he spots a woman who reminds him of Madeleine. Scottie follows the woman to her hotel room where she identifies herself as Judy Barton from Kansas. Though initially suspicious and defensive, Judy eventually agrees to join Scottie for dinner.
After Scottie leaves Judy has a flashback revealing she was, in fact, the woman known as "Madeleine," but she is not Gavin's wife. Judy writes a confession letter to Scottie explaining she was an accomplice to the real Madeleine Elster's murder by Gavin, and how Gavin had taken advantage of Scottie's acrophobia. She rips up the letter and decides to continue the charade because of her love for Scottie.
Scottie remains obsessed by his memory of "Madeleine" and their similarities. He transforms Judy until she once more resembles Madeleine. Judy agrees to change on the chance they may finally find happiness together. Scottie realizes the truth when Judy wears a unique necklace that he saw in the portrait of Carlotta Valdes. Instead of dinner, Scottie insists on taking Judy to the Mission San Juan Bautista.
There, he reveals that he wants to reenact the event that led to his madness, admitting that he now knows Madeleine and Judy are the same. Scottie forces her up the bell tower and angrily presses Judy to admit her deceit. Scottie reaches the top, conquering his acrophobia at last. Judy confesses that Gavin had hired her to pose as a possessed Madeleine; Gavin faked the suicide by tossing the body of his already-murdered wife out the window.
Judy pleads to Scottie to forgive her because she loves him. The two embrace when a nun emerges from the trapdoor and Judy steps backward falling to her death. Scottie stands perched on a narrow ledge while the nun rings the mission bell.
The screenplay is an adaptation of the French novel The Living and the Dead (D'entre les morts) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Hitchcock had previously tried to buy the rights to the same authors' previous novel, Celle qui n'était plus, but he failed, and it was made instead by Henri-Georges Clouzot as Les Diaboliques.[2] Although François Truffaut once suggested that D'Entre les morts was specifically written for Hitchcock by Boileau and Narcejac,[3] Narcejac subsequently denied that this was their intention.[4] However, Hitchcock's interest in their work meant that Paramount Pictures commissioned a synopsis of D'Entre les morts in 1954, before it had even been translated into English.[5]
Hitchcock originally hired playwright Maxwell Anderson to write a screenplay, but rejected his work, which was entitled Listen Darkling. The final script was written by Samuel A. Taylor — who was recommended to Hitchcock due to his knowledge of San Francisco —[5] from notes by Hitchcock. Among Taylor's creations was the character of Midge.[6] Taylor attempted to take sole credit for the screenplay, but Alec Coppel — the other screenplay writer hired by Hitchcock — protested to the Screen Writers Guild, which determined that both writers were entitled to a credit.[7]
When actress Vera Miles, who was under personal contract to Hitchcock and had appeared on both his television show and in his film The Wrong Man, could not act in Vertigo owing to her pregnancy, the director declined to postpone shooting and cast Kim Novak as the female lead. Ironically, by the time Novak had tied up prior film commitments and a vacation promised by Columbia Pictures, the studio that held her contract, Miles had given birth and was available for the film. Hitchcock proceeded with Novak, nevertheless. Columbia head Harry Cohn agreed to lend Novak to Vertigo if Stewart would agree to co-star with Novak in Bell, Book and Candle, a Columbia production released in December 1958.
In the book, Judy's involvment in Madeleine's death was not revealed until the denoument. At the script stage, Hitchcock suggested revealing the secret two-thirds of the way through the film so that the audience would understand Judy's mental dilemma.[8] After the first preview, Hitchcock was unsure whether to keep the "letter writing scene" or not. He decided to remove it. Herbert Coleman, Vertigo's associate producer and a frequent collaborator with Hitchcock, felt the removal was a mistake. However, Hitchcock said "Release it just like that." James Stewart agreed with Hitchcock and said to Coleman: "Herbie, you shouldn't get so upset with Hitch. The picture's not that important." Coleman made the necessary edits. Hitchcock's decision was supported by Joan Harrison who felt that the film had been improved. When he received news of the edits, the head of Paramount, Barney Balaban was very vocal about the edits and ordered Hitchcock to "Put the picture back the way it was." As a result, the "letter writing scene" remained in the final film.[9]
A coda to the film was shot that showed Midge and a more-or-less healed Scottie listening to a radio report (voiced by unseen San Francisco radio announcer Dave McElhatton) of Gavin Elster's capture in Europe. This ending was mandated by British censorship requirements (where the murderer could not be allowed to get away with his crime) and was not featured in the American cut of the film. It is included as an extra in the restored DVD release.
The score was written by Bernard Herrmann. It was not conducted by him, but was conducted by Muir Mathieson and recorded in Europe, due to a musician's strike in the U.S.[10]
In a 2004 special issue by Sight & Sound devoted to Film Music, Martin Scorsese described the qualities of Herrmann's famous score:
Hitchcock's film is about obsession, which means that it's about circling back to the same moment, again and again ... And the music is also built around spirals and circles, fulfilment and despair. Herrmann really understood what Hitchcock was going for — he wanted to penetrate to the heart of obsession.[10]
Filmed from September to December 1957, Vertigo uses location footage of the San Francisco Bay Area, with its steep hills and tall, arching bridges. In the driving scenes shot in the city, the main characters' cars are almost always pictured heading down the city's steeply inclined streets.[11] In October 1996, the restored print of Vertigo debuted at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco with a live on-stage introduction by surviving cast member Kim Novak, providing the city a chance to celebrate itself.[12] Visiting the San Francisco film locations has something of a cult following as well as modest tourist appeal. Such a tour is featured in a subsection of Chris Marker's documentary montage Sans Soleil.
In March 1997, the cultural French magazine Les Inrockuptibles published a special issue titled Vertigo's about the film locations in San Francisco, Dans le décor, which lists and describes all actual locations.[13]
Areas that were shot on location (not recreated in a studio):[14]
Vertigo premiered in San Francisco on May 9, 1958 at the Stage Door Theater at Mason and Geary (now the Ruby Skye nightclub). Its performance at the box office was average,[18] and reviews were mixed. Variety said the film showed Hitchcock's "mastery", but was too long and slow for "what is basically only a psychological murder mystery".[19] Similarly, the Los Angeles Times admired the scenery, but found the plot "too long" and felt it "bogs down" in "a maze of detail"; scholar Dan Aulier says that this review "sounded the tone that most popular critics would take with the film".[20] However, the Los Angeles Examiner loved it, admiring the "excitement, action, romance, glamor and [the] crazy, off-beat love story".[21] As well, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther also gave Vertigo a positive review by explaining that "[the] secret [of the film] is so clever, even though it is devilishly far-fetched."[22]
Additional reasons for the mixed response initially were that Hitchcock fans were not pleased with his departure from the romantic-thriller territory of earlier films and that the mystery was solved with one-third of the film left to go.[23]
In an interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock stated that Vertigo was one of his favorite films, with some reservations.[24] Hitchcock blamed the film's failure on Stewart, at age 50, looking too old to play a convincing love interest for Kim Novak, who at 25 was half his age.[25]
Hitchcock and Stewart received awards at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, including a Silver Seashell for Best Director (tied with Mario Monicelli for I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street aka Persons Unknown) and Best Actor (also tied, with Kirk Douglas in The Vikings). The film was nominated for just two Academy Awards, in the technical categories[26] Best Art Direction - Black-and-White or Color (Hal Pereira, Henry Bumstead, Samuel M. Comer, Frank McKelvy) and Best Sound (George Dutton).[27]
In the 1950s, the French Cahiers du cinéma critics began re-evaluating Hitchcock as a serious artist rather than just a populist showman. However, even François Truffaut's important 1962 interviews with Hitchcock (not published in English until 1967) mentions Vertigo only in passing. Dan Aulier has suggested that the real beginning of Vertigo's rise in adulation was the British-Canadian scholar Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films (1968), which calls the film "Hitchcock's masterpiece to date and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us".[28] Adding to its mystique was the fact that Vertigo was one of five films owned by Hitchcock which was removed from circulation in 1973. When Vertigo was re-released in theaters in October 1983, and then on home video in October 1984, it achieved an impressive commercial success and laudatory reviews.[29] Similarly adulatory reviews were written for the October 1996 showing of a restored print in 70mm and DTS sound at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.[30]
In 1989, Vertigo was recognized as a "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" film by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in the first year of the registry's voting.
The film ranked 4th and 2nd respectively in Sight and Sound's 1992 and 2002 critic polls of the best films ever made.[31][32] In 2005, Vertigo came in second (to Goodfellas) in British magazine Total Film's book 100 Greatest Movies of All Time.[33]
In his book Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, however, British film critic Tom Shone argued that Vertigo's critical re-evaluation has led to excessive praise, and argued for a more measured response. Faulting Sight and Sound for "perennially" putting the film on the list of best-ever films, he wrote that "Hitchcock is a director who delights in getting his plot mechanisms buffed up to a nice humming shine, and so the Sight and Sound team praise the one film of his in which this is not the case – it's all loose ends and lopsided angles, its plumbing out on display for the critic to pick over at his leisure."
American Film Institute recognition
In 1996, director Harrison Engle produced a documentary about the making of Hitchcock's classic, Obsessed with Vertigo. Narrated by Roddy McDowell, the film played on American Movie Classics, and has since been included with DVD versions of Vertigo. Surviving members of the cast and crew participated, along with noted filmmaker Martin Scorsese and Alfred's daughter, Patricia Hitchcock. Engle first visited the Vertigo shooting locations in the summer of 1958, just months after completion of the film.
In 1996, the film was given a lengthy and controversial restoration by Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz and re-released to theaters. The new print featured restored color and newly created audio, utilizing modern sound effects mixed in DTS digital surround sound. In October 1996, the restored Vertigo premiered at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, with Kim Novak and Patricia Hitchcock in person. At this screening, the film was exhibited for the first time in DTS and 70mm, a format with a similar frame size to the VistaVision system in which it was originally shot.
One bone of contention regarding the 1996 restoration was the decision to re-record the foley sound effects from scratch (to allow Dolby-quality mixing for surround sound and stereo). Harris and Katz wanted to stay as close as possible to the original: "It was our intent to re-mix the original music tracks with dialogue culled from the old mono and new Foley and effects tracks, which were to have been created following Mr. Hitchcock's original notes. That was the intent. It is not what occurred, the studio having made the decision to re-invent the track anew."[35] Harris and Katz sometimes added extra sound effects to camouflage defects in the old soundtrack ("hisses, pops, and bangs"); in particular they added extra seagull cries and a foghorn to the scene at Cypress Point.[36] The new mix has also been accused of putting too much emphasis on the score at the expense of the sound effects.[37] The 2005 Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection DVD contains the original mono track as an option.
Significant color correction was necessary because of the fading of original negatives. In some cases a new negative was created from the silver separation masters, but in many instances this was impossible because of differential separation shrinkage, and because the 1958 separations were poorly made. Separations used three individual films: one for each of the primary colors. In the case of Vertigo, these had shrunk in different and erratic proportions, making re-alignment impossible. As such, significant amounts of computer assisted coloration were necessary. Although the results are not noticeable on viewing the film, some elements were as many as eight generations away from the original negative, in particular the entire "Judy's Apartment" sequence, which is perhaps the most pivotal sequence in the entire film (on a large screen this sequence appears to be a 16mm duplicate of the original).
When such large portions of re-creation become necessary, then the danger of artistic license by the restorers becomes an issue, and the restorers received some criticism for their re-creation of colors that allegedly did not honor the director and cinematographer's intentions. The restoration team argued that they did research on the colors used in the original locations, cars, wardrobe, and skin tones. One breakthrough moment came when the Ford Motor Company supplied a well-preserved green paint sample for a car used in the film. As the use of the color green in the film has artistic importance, matching a shade of green was a stroke of luck for restoration and provided a reference shade from which to work.[38]
Restoration
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