Cop without a clue: ‘Vertigo’ takes filmmaking, and cynicism, to historic heights
“Vertigo” ads promised “Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece.” They jumped the gun. “Psycho” was still two years away. And “North by Northwest” was right around the corner. The Master of Suspense was just getting started.
Then again, maybe the Marketing Dept. was on to something. It’s “Vertigo,” not those other two films or any other from Hitchock’s enormous canon, that felled “Citizen Kane” and achieved No. 1 status in the Sight and Sound poll in 2012.
It’s a little like ranking Brown No. 1 among Ivy League schools. Fine choice. But you’ll get pushback. For whatever reason, the notion of a woman with possible multiple identities resonates with arthouse critics probably more than any other theme. Look at others high up the lists: “L’Avventura.” “Persona.” “Mulholland Dr.” “Celine and Julie Go Boating.” For Altman, there was “3 Women.” For Bunuel, there was “That Obscure Object of Desire” and maybe “Belle de Jour” too.
The artistic case for “Vertigo” is unimpeachable. It’s the story that could reach higher heights. It’s best explained as the beast within men and how a woman may activate it. Maybe it’s a satire of humans’ interest in the supernatural. Hitchcock has bookended “Vertigo” with two of the most gripping sequences in movies. In between, there are powerful but disjointed themes, mostly about the relationship between men and women and the exertion of power, a pining for the past. Not enough of these themes are shown, they are relayed in the history being read to the audience, conversations in rooms, people driving cars. “Vertigo” has more than enough sum of the parts to justify a No. 1 ranking. Those parts, unfortunately, are far greater than the whole.
On some level, “Vertigo,” released in 1958, seems like classic noir. Noir’s heyday was a decade prior to “Vertigo.” Europeans would revive the genre in the ’60s. “Vertigo” and “Touch of Evil,” released coincidentally about the same time, seem as much like “neo-noir.”
“Vertigo” is in vivid VistaVision color. “Chinatown,“ 16 years later, is also in beautiful color. In both movies, the protagonist (basically in the same line of work) is duped by failing to do a simple background check on the person hiring him. In “Chinatown,” this mistake is addressed early. Incredibly, “Vertigo” succumbs to what Roger Ebert used to call The Idiot Plot; he would write that “Everyone in the movie is an idiot or the mystery would be solved in five minutes.” Even when Scottie compares notes with a landlord for a couple minutes, it never occurs to anyone that one or both of them is being had. Perhaps “Vertigo” is informing us that one of the side-effects of a man experiencing passion is alarming incompetence.
The scheme to hire Scottie meets the standards for noir plausibility. That doesn’t make it successful. The mastermind, a character named Gavin Elster, is not hiring a stooge to enable his atrocity; he’s hiring a veteran officer who, in theory at least, would easily become suspicious of this fantastic tale and ask active members of the department to investigate. It shouldn’t be too hard to ask people for information about this curious wife of Mr. Elster who’s acting strangely and may be possessed — after all, she sounds like an heiress of some kind. Instead, Scottie falls for the story whole hog, especially the supernatural nonsense.
Oh, what about the other woman. You would think, at a minimum, Scottie would ask his confidante and ex-fiancee, Midge, for her assessment of this strange marital situation. Scottie only gives Midge a small amount of info, unlike in their other conversations, presumably because he doesn’t want Midge to interrupt his fascination with this subject.
Which is a change for Scottie. Because early on, we see that Midge is a lingerie designer and that Scottie is not the least bit interested in her latest bra prototype. He is worn out, beaten down, devoid of sexual interest. (Nevertheless, he will wear a suit and tie everywhere including around the house, an interesting choice of attire for a retired detective with no job.)
Midge is played by Barbara Bel Geddes, who would become more famous as the matriarch in the long-running TV soap “Dallas.” There is a French film called “La maman et la putain” (The Mother and the Whore) that bluntly, and powerfully, portrays what a man sees as his choices in life. The title pretty much says it all. (Notice the title uses the word “and” rather than “or.”) That movie was released in 1973. Fifteen years earlier, “Vertigo” is making a similar distinction.
Perhaps the contrast between Midge and Madeleine is why “Vertigo,” unlike many other Hitchcock films, does not include an actual, possessive mother dominating her son’s life. Scottie is free to pursue whomever he wants; the judgments are his own.
Midge and Scottie click. They’re right for each other. The problem is, Midge is ordinary. She once had Scottie. She’s still in love with him, but he’s in love with someone else. Midway through the film, she makes a bold move to seduce Scottie — painting a portrait of herself in the image that Scottie is chasing. His reaction is to bolt. In tears, she faces the work and calls herself “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”
Her disappointment is something like that of Donna Pescow’s Annette in “Saturday Night Fever.” Annette and Tony are from similar social backgrounds, have similar interests and have fun together. She thinks she still has a chance at him even as he has met someone different. Too different. Annette won’t do. Tony and Annette are not as educated as Scottie and Midge, but when Annette unveils her less-sophisticated version of a suggestion — a handful of condoms — only to be rebuffed, it is an equally depressing moment.
In the first scene with Scottie and Midge, Scottie has been emasculated and trying to emerge from it. He can’t work and is wearing a corset. She relays a theory about what may cure his acrophobia, a theory that probably doesn’t pass muster with real psychologists but works great in a movie. Scottie and Midge recount how they were once engaged for “three whole weeks.” He reminds her that she called off the engagement. This is an important statement that is not earned by the rest of the movie. She describes her love life as “normal” and winces at this subject. He says he’s “available,” but she’s really the one who’s available.
The crucial philosophical conversation of “Vertigo” takes place about 11 minutes into the film when Scottie is visiting with an old college friend, Gavin Elster, in Elster’s office. Clearly, these two haven’t spoken for a while.
Elster reveals his mindset in broad strokes in his early discussion with Scottie, which to most cops would be a red flag. Elster is apparently wealthy and in the shipbuilding business, but he’s only in the shipbuilding business because “I married into it,” and he finds it “dull.” What’s more, his wife’s family “is all gone.”
Elster is played by Tom Helmore. You’ve seen him, most likely, in nothing else; he was prolific in the 1930s and as a stage actor. He seems to be a gentleman with a problem. But it’s telling that for the problem he describes, he is consulting Scottie, not a doctor. And Elster makes a couple more revealing comments about the way he thinks life should be: “The things that spell San Francisco to me are disappearing fast,” he says, without really explaining why, and, referring to artwork depicting an older era on his office wall, he admits, “I should’ve liked to live here then. Color. Excitement. Power. Freedom.”
So Elster at best has nostalgia for the past; at worst, he’s a reactionary. What is this power and freedom he is referring to? Was San Francisco, like Scottie’s driving (Roger Ebert points this out), so downhill in 1958? “Vertigo” comes at an interesting time. San Francisco already had the cable cars and had just lured away the New York Giants. However, it had yet to become famous for counterculture or gay rights or stretched tech-stock valuations. Midge will say at one point that San Francisco had “gay old bohemian days,” and she doesn’t mean “gay” like we do now. (Presumably.) Elster almost sounds a little like Richard Boone in the 1970s TV movie “The Last Dinosaur,” viewing himself as belonging in an earlier time. Elster’s observations on the city are not enough to explain the scheme he concocts. Rather, it seems something like the plot of Hitchcock’s “Rope,” in which elites commit a murder purely out of the thrill of trying to get away with it. Nevertheless, Elster’s motivation seems like what Hitchcock would call a MacGuffin. What only matters is that Scottie falls for it.
Scottie’s detective radar should’ve been going off during Elster’s commentary, but Scottie’s oblivious to any chicanery here and seems annoyed at the request (even though he apparently has nothing to do). He concludes that either this old friend or the friend’s wife is a little off their rocker, and he’ll humor Elster by accepting the assignment.
Shortly after Scottie has begun his stalking and learned of the mysterious Carlotta Valdes, Midge takes Scottie to a bookseller well familiar with local lore. That man explains that Carlotta was a poor cabaret singer swept away by “a rich man” who built her a house but took their child. The bookseller, echoing Gavin Elster, reveals, “He threw her away ... A man could do that in those days. They had the power and the freedom.”
Horror is probably too strong of a term, but “Vertigo” has to be one of the most cynical films ever made, even more than “Chinatown” and antihero works such as “The Godfather” or “The Player.” Two criminals get away with their crimes while three lives are lost in the mayhem. A person of high society is completely taking advantage of an old friend. An admirable woman draws no interest while a dubious one is coveted by two men. In “Vertigo,” it’s not what you are, it’s what you look like.
Roger Ebert was too young to review “Vertigo” in real time. According to details at rogerebert.com, he made it in the mid-’90s one of his earliest selections for his Great Movies portal. His “Vertigo” review is dated online as Oct. 13, 1996, when a newly restored 70mm version was playing in Chicago, but this early inclusion by Ebert is still a significant distinction, like baseball’s first Hall of Fame class. Ebert says “Vertigo” is “one of the two or three best films Hitchcock ever made” and asserts it is Hitchcock’s “most confessional” picture and that “He is represented by Scottie.” Ebert says “Vertigo” is “about how Hitchcock used, feared and tried to control women.”
He writes how Hitchcock’s films routinely humiliated the female characters, always blondes. But Ebert never mentions Midge. She is what Ebert would, in other movies, call the Reliable Observer. She can keep Scottie grounded and do all kinds of supportive things for him. But she can’t make him feel the way he feels when he sees Madeleine. This seems as much a statement by Hitchcock as the “confessional” that Ebert sees and is the artistic tragedy here.
Why did Midge call off the engagement? From their conversation, it does not appear she was wronged, but had a sixth sense.
At the time of Ebert’s Great Movies review, his Chicago Tribune rival Michael Wilmington wrote a lengthy piece (Oct. 18, 1996) about the history of “Vertigo” as a “critical and box office disappointment” and outright “flop” and “failure,” only to emerge decades later as “one of the most influential of all American movies.” Wilmington writes, “Contrary to legend, the first newspaper reviews on ‘Vertigo’ were very good. It was the ‘serious’ magazine reviews in Time, Newsweek and The New Yorker that dismissed the movie.” Wilmington says anyone calling the film a “masterpiece” back in 1958 “probably would have been considered a fool.”
A Chicago Tribune movie guide in November 1958 lists “Vertigo”
near the bottom of films considered merely “good.”
The Chicago Tribune’s William Leonard wrote in a short review on June 2, 1958, that Vertigo is a “highly commendable whodunit.” He describes the plot this way: “Stewart is a retired detective who falls in love with a woman who is in love with the ghost of her own great-grandmother. When his sweetheart becomes a ghost herself, he falls in love with that ghost.”
Pauline Kael barely mentioned the film in any of her reviews or articles, other than noting its references in “High Anxiety.” She did not become prominent until after the release of “Vertigo” and apparently saw nothing to champion or condemn in it, though “Marnie” evidently rankled her. In a 2002 interview with The Guardian, Kael tells of meeting Hitchcock and being unimpressed, suggesting he was a businessman detached from the art form. His wife, Kael said, was happy to discuss films, but Alfred had seen little and had little to talk about. “I liked her a lot, but he kept breaking off to talk about his wine cellar and his champagne collection. These seemed more vital to him than talking about movies,” Kael said. “I got very distressed when we talked about actors, because he had often cast people not after seeing them in pictures but from seeing them on a reel of film their agents brought.”
Still, in the arthouse world, Hitchcock in his heyday had backers in high places. Such as Truffaut. Reviewing Truffaut’s book Hitchcock in 1968, Andrew Sarris writes that Truffaut apparently experienced some of the same frustration people have with Woody Allen. “Truffaut draws a complete blank when he tries to get Hitchcock to talk about his dreams,” Sarris writes, but he notes that nothing about Hitchcock’s work is “too trivial for mention.” Sarris concludes that “a second look at ‘Rear Window,’ ‘Notorious,’ ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Psycho’ may confirm Truffaut’s thesis that a major artist lurks beneath the facade of a master entertainer.”
“Vertigo” boasts one of the strongest openings in cinema. We see a partial woman’s face in extreme close-up, somewhat shaded, almost like something out of Bergman’s “Persona,” which arrived eight years later. Then the screen turns to red and, while credits roll and Bernard Herrmann’s frantic score plays, we see colorful spinning circles and vortexes, some elliptical, all oval, some oddly shaped. The artwork resembles depictions of the universe, or planets, or atomic structure. We get the sense of motion. It will be the same motion Scottie experiences, on a few occasions, when dealing with his fear of heights. This sequence is immediately followed by one of the shortest, and most haunting, police chases. It is a disturbing way to open a film and a grim depiction even for those who’ve seen it many times. It too is flawed yet is also the short-term peak of the film.
Was it the vertigo that caused Scottie to stumble? It seems vertigo was the effect of the stumble, not the cause. That does not negate the plot that follows but is an important qualifier. Scottie’s overriding problem figures to be guilt, not vertigo. Exactly why vertigo would be a career-ender for a detective is not clear. We also learn that Scottie has injured his back in the incident, implying he is damaged goods physically as well. But his back is never a problem. (And how did Scottie finally get down safely? Hitchcock is saying it doesn’t matter. It’s the same approach of the ending of “North by Northwest” a year later. In that film, Hitchcock’s right. It doesn’t matter. It’s fun. Saint and Grant have been through enough. We know they’re going to make it. In “Vertigo,” we are hit with startling drama. Something incredibly improbable happened offscreen to save the protagonist’s life, and we have no idea what it was.)
That scene is not necessarily a flashback but functions as one. We then meet Scottie at Midge’s home. This is heavy, leaden conversation in which important booklike elements, for expediency purposes, must be read by the characters to the movie audience. Over seven minutes, Scottie will provide his current condition and future plans. He and Midge will recap their romantic history. They will discuss the acquaintance whose strange request will drive the plot. Midge will reveal her social status. They will discuss lingerie and reveal sexual sensitivities. They will speculate on cures for acrophobia. Finally, he will demonstrate where he is at psychologically.
Scottie then heads for Gavin Elster’s office, where over five minutes, we are given a lot more important tell and virtually no show. Some details in movie conversations register easily. When it’s about the supposed possession of a still-unseen third party’s body, it’s too much to digest. Once Scottie agrees to the assignment, the film will proceed for about 11 minutes without any spoken dialogue, as Scottie begins to piece together what Madeleine is doing. Why is a possessed person so interested in spending her limited time viewing her gravesite and artwork of herself? Who knows. Scottie won’t tell Midge everything about what’s going on, but she somehow figures it out exactly and realizes why Scottie is so interested in this assignment.
As Scottie embarks on another round of stalking, he sees Madeleine jump into the water and then must nurse her back to health, with roughly eight more minutes of living room conversations about repressed memories, before a sightseeing trip to the sequoias, at which point Madeleine finally realizes she has fallen for Scottie while faithfully carrying out the scheme with the remarkable precision of a trained actor. The inquest will supply crucial details to set up the remaining 40 minutes. But again, these are more important revelations told, not shown. (And isn’t it curious that the last person to see the woman alive, a police officer, somehow never sees the body.)
Even during the powerful closing sequence, “Vertigo” will frustrate, especially modern audiences. An older man, like in Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 “Dreams,” is relentlessly buying a younger woman outfits and dressing her up like a doll. (Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak are 25 years apart.) She finds the attention flattering but is troubled by it. Much of the ending will feature the man physically strong-arming the woman. “Vertigo” was made in a time when women in movies were still struck, grabbed, shaken in routine scenes.
Hitchcock would say things about moviemaking much like Warren Buffett talks about investing. Ebert sees the film as “confessional” for Hitchcock’s treatment of women, but one wonders whether Hitchcock believes there was anything wrong with that. He is possibly the most acclaimed filmmaker of all time, he has numerous films around the tops of critics’ all-time lists, and he was commercial, profitable.
Ebert writes, “Judy, in ‘Vertigo,’ is the closest he came to sympathizing with the female victims of his plots. ... From the moment we are let in on the secret, the movie is equally about Judy: her pain, her loss, the trap she’s in.” Ebert argues that “Novak, criticized at the time for playing the character too stiffly, has made the correct acting choices.”
Helen of Troy is an extremely difficult standard. That is the insurmountable challenge “Vertigo” gives itself. Presenting, in a medium of beauties, a woman who buckles knees. In almost every movie, attractive women and men become attracted to each other. But if we are to believe that a well-grounded character has turned his life upside down because he’s obsessed with a woman, we, the audience, have to be a little bit obsessed as well. Otherwise, his obsession is tiresome.
It worked, for sure, in “10.” And in “Pretty Woman.” And “Titanic.” And a little bit in “Last Tango in Paris.” It is a stretch for Richard Dreyfuss in “American Graffiti” and doesn’t really work in “The Player” (though the rest of the movie does) and absolutely is a bust in “Wall Street,” as Oliver Stone tries to convince us that Bud would be motivated by someone as uninteresting as Darien.
For Jimmy Stewart, “Vertigo” is a workmanlike performance, not a legendary one. Never does he ignite in Madeleine’s presence. Consider Scottie in contrast to Dudley Moore’s George Webber in “10.” George is disrupted by visions of this woman and must pursue her across the border. Eventually, reality sets in, and George achieves a certain enlightenment to the benefit of himself and those around him. Scottie is hopelessly adrift, catatonic even, over a woman who, by the standards of these movies, is quite ordinary. Hitchcock’s earlier muses, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman, may have pulled it off. Kim Novak has much more of a swagger as Judy than Madeleine. San Francisco critic Mick LaSalle wrote in a response to a reader in August 2024 that, “I don’t see what she did in ‘Vertigo’ as notably good or bad. She was just sort of there.” Yes.
Shortly after the movie’s release, the Chicago Tribune’s Arlene Dahl wrote a fashion article: “Kim Novak plays, in effect, two different roles — an elegant society beauty, and a cheap, flashy shopgirl. It isn’t done with mirrors. It’s done with makeup, clothes, coiffure.” Hitchcock indicated to Hedda Hopper in 1958 that Novak perhaps felt out of her league. “I learned she was scared stiff and put on a defensive front. I didn’t have to teach her lots of acting. I had to relax her and give her confidence.”
Novak, now 91, is the only cast member still alive.
What triggers the massively successful conclusion of “Vertigo” is Scottie’s haunting nightmare — most haunting in the “Exorcist”-like images of Carlotta standing among him and Gavin Elster — in which colors and even cartoonish shapes flash around Scottie’s head. This type of motif is seen in Godard’s works of the ’60s.
Wilmington indicates that early skeptics’ chief complaint was that Hitchcock was “giving away his movie’s ‘surprise ending’ half an hour early.” Critics may not have pounded the table for the film, but neither did Hollywood. “Vertigo” received Oscar nominations only for art direction-set decoration and sound and did not win either. It’s true that the audience may care less about who Scottie’s dating than how he was set up. But even though the surprise does not conclude the film, it is just as haunting and disturbing as the opening police chase. And there’s more to come. Ebert singles out the ghostly reemergence of Madeleine late in the film as “the greatest single shot in all of Hitchcock.”
“Vertigo” is an adaptation of the 1954 crime thriller “The Living and the Dead,” set in Paris and written by the French duo Boileau-Narcejac. In the book, the Scottie character is a lawyer (his initial career path in “Vertigo,” we’re told), and the belltower incident turns out slightly differently for the parties involved.
According to a March 1958 article in the Chicago Tribune by Hollywood writer Larry Wolters, the movie’s working title was “From Among the Dead.” But Hitchcock told Wolters he was going to call it “Vertigo,” explaining, “It’s a short, incisive title that’ll look good on a marquee.”
Indeed. It is an exceptional title. A Mexican film of 1946, in Spanish, was given the title “Vértigo”; presumably there was no confusion with American audiences of 1958. Sometimes pictures can be enhanced, for lack of a better word, by the marketing. “Citizen Kane” offered the notion of a suppressed film that “they” don’t want you to see. “Vertigo” has the artwork of Saul Bass for its posters and graphics. The swirl of a man’s world over bright orange and that beautiful, uneven, unforgettable font. But is “orange” the correct description? A check of vintage posters for sale online shows the famous 1-sheet is typically available in faded orange. But those posters are more than 60 years old and generally have been exposed to light. Other 1958 sizes — half-sheets, 3-sheets, 30x40s and 40x60s — as well as 1-sheet re-releases tend to be more reddish.
An ad for “Vertigo” in the Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1958
“Vertigo” proves that San Francisco is the third-best American movie city, albeit a distant third, after L.A./New York, which are probably interchangeable. You get the hills, the docks, the cable cars, the bridge, the fog. A sense of wealth, of beauty, of mystery. You even get a car chase, admittedly a low-speed one, years before “Bullitt” and “What’s Up, Doc?”
Gavin Elster in “Vertigo” is a person. Metaphorically, is he something else? Some form of human exasperation ... entitlement? Gullibility for the supernatural? What will become of him? The chief witness against him is deceased. Scottie of course will report the whole scheme and a body will be exhumed. Elster’s lawyer will surely question how two women who look alike could die at the same place within a year and why Scottie just happened to take them up there and be the last person to see each one. Scottie has as his witness a nun, who will have to convince authorities of a stranger reality than the yarn Gavin Elster spun to Scottie.
In the endless debate over whether movies constitute art, or entertainment, “Vertigo” is Exhibit A. It is a majestic arthouse achievement of enormous influence ... and a disappointment at what it was designed to do. It still launched the most incredible three-year run of moviemaking that would be crowned by “North by Northwest” and “Psycho.” It mystifies in every sense. “Vertigo” is a masterwork. It’s not perfection.
3.5 stars
(August 2024)
“Vertigo” (1958)
Starring
James Stewart
as John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson
♦
Kim Novak
as Madeleine Elster / Judy Barton
♦
Barbara Bel Geddes
as Marjorie ‘Midge’ Wood
♦
Tom Helmore
as Gavin Elster
♦
Henry Jones
as Coroner
♦
Raymond Bailey
as Scottie’s Doctor
♦
Ellen Corby
as Manager of McKittrick Hotel
♦
Konstantin Shayne
as Pop Leibel
♦
Lee Patrick
as Car Owner Mistaken for Madeleine
Directed by: Alfred Hitchock
Written by: Alec Coppel (screenplay)
Written by: Samuel Taylor (screenplay)
Written by: Pierre Boileau (novel)
Written by: Thomas Narcejac (novel)
Associate producer: Herbert Coleman
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Editing: George Tomasini
Art direction: Henry Bumstead, Hal Pereira
Set decoration: Sam Comer, Frank McKelvy
Costumes: Edith Head
Makeup and hair: Nellie Manley, Wally Westmore
Conductor: Muir Mathieson
Titles: Saul Bass
Special sequence: John Ferren
