Encountering Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” for the first time
My first impressions
Last year, in 2012, a report in Singapore’s The Straits
Times caught my eye: Vertigo (made in 1957) had displaced Citizen Kane as the
greatest film ever made in the history of cinema. Vertigo was a film I had been meaning to see,
after having caught an intriguing trailer for it on TV sometime somewhere. I
finally got to watch it early this year.
For a film of which so much has been written and about which
I have since read much, it is important that I first record here my first
impressions of it, when I watched it fresh, just like the original audiences
did back in 1958 - long before the film became a legend.
The first thing that struck me was the thing that it was
most criticized for on its first release: the slow and languorous pace as the
detective James Stewart trails his target Kim Novak through San Francisco. It was totally intriguing because I was
caught up in trying to work out what was going on, obviously the most basic
effect that Hitchcock must have wanted, which is why I can’t understand this
criticism. I didn’t know it then on my
first viewing, but this segment would linger long in my memory and turn it from
being an intriguing segment (ie, a response on the basic level of plot) into a
mesmerizing, and ultimately, a haunting bracket of moments long after the film
ended. Now, when I think of Vertigo, this is what I think of.
The second thing that struck me was the astonishing full
orchestral score that wove its way all through the film, a rich and sensual
piece of music that reminded me so much of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. I had never encountered a film which was so
totally awash with orchestral sounds. And I was very aware of how much impact
it was having on the film, and on my response to it.
The third thing that struck me was the extraordinary
presence of Kim Novak, whose impact as the enigmatic Madeleine would linger in
the mind longer than any other element in this film. But on that first viewing, I didn’t know this
yet. All I thought of then was that I
never knew Novak was capable of such a performance as she delivered in her dual
roles of Madeleine and Judy. The
differentiation Novak had made in the two characterizations in voice, manner
and movement had been so convincing that I actually thought Judy was being
played by a different actress (albeit one that bore some resemblance to Kim
Novak!). I had known about Kim Novak only as a glamorous Hollywood star (even
in far-flung Singapore in the 1960s I remember a beauty salon called Kim Novak
Beauty Salon), not as an actor and certainly not as an actor of this calibre.
On that first viewing, when the credits rolled at the end, I
was hit by the abruptness of the ending, a shock that came on the heels of
other shocks along the way. I sat there
for a few moments pondering on the film, absorbing it purely on the level of story
and plot, and not yet on those artistic and metaphysical dimensions that have
propelled it to its current status as the ‘best film of all time’. On that memorable evening, without having read
the tomes of critical adulation that I have since read, I was nevertheless
aware that I had just watched a memorable film.
And just how memorable it would be I had no idea until a few days ago
when I knew I had to sit down and write this blog article, because I write blog
articles only once every few years.
Reflecting on the film now
The first thing to understand is that although the film is
set within the genre framework of a murder thriller, a common enough
expectation for a Hitchcock film, that is only the plot-line. To respond to it solely as a murder-thriller would
lead only to seeing its improbable story.
But that is Hitchcock, of course.
You can almost hear him saying with a smile, “But it’s only a film, my dear.” Film is not real-life, and Hitchcock films
need not be probable. As he himself
said, a film needs only to be plausible, not probable.
No, the film’s impact lies in how strongly it speaks to so
many people about romantic and sexual idealization, the gulf between the
imagination and reality, passion and its personification, truth and lies,
self-knowledge and self-delusion. And at
the heart of it all, the perennial and universal human desire to love and be
loved.
The essential contribution of Kim Novak
Scottie’s (James Stewart) journey through the above waters
as the main protagonist is clearly and unambiguously charted, but in a film
with so many elements contributing to its impact, it is now clearer to me that
there is one element that has contributed most essentially to how the film has turned out: the performance of Kim Novak.
It is well known that the role was originally
intended for Vera Miles, but as the Australian director Richard Franklin has
pointed out:
I have seen material of
Vera in the Madeleine/Judy part and am firmly convinced that the main reason
VERTIGO transcends all
of Hitchcock's other work is the performance, the sensuality (and
vulnerability) of Kim Novak…Vera was beautiful, but did NOT possess the
ethereal quality of Kim. Eva Marie Saint, Grace Kelly and even
'Madeleine' Carroll do
not come close. When I first showed the picture to my friend and colleague Dr
George Miller (MAD MAX,
LORENZO'S OIL, WITCHES OF EASTWICK), who you may be aware is a student
of Joseph Campbell et al, he commented
he had never seen a more perfect embodiment of the Jungian 'anima'
than Kim Novak in VERTIGO. Kim's Madeleine is simply
the perfect female.
Novak
herself has explained her emotional identification with the Madeleine/Judy role:
The script was always the
most important thing to me and I loved the script. For one thing, I’ve
always admired trees. I just worship them. Think what trees have
witnessed, what history, such as living through the Civil War, yet they still
survive…When I read that part of the Hitchcock script where Madeleine and
Scottie are among the redwoods, she touches the tree rings and says, “Here I
was born and here I died. It was only a moment. You took no
notice,” I got goose-bumps. When it came to shoot that scene, I had
goose-bumps. Just touching that old tree was truly moving to me
because when you touch these trees, you have such a sense of the passage of
time, of history. It’s like you’re touching the essence, the very
substance of life. I remember taking my father to see the redwood forest
once. He wept and so did I. He ‘got’ it in the same way as I
do. We never talked about it. That scene in Vertigo I felt
more than any other, except the one in which Judy says to Jimmy’s character
that if she lets him change her, will he love her? And she says she’ll do
it, she doesn’t care any more about herself. That scene was so important
to me. I was so naked there, so willing to be anything he
wanted, just to be loved.
Novak’s
discussion of these two moments in Vertigo reveals the reason why there was
such an unsettling resonance in her performance, such a sense of the
vulnerability and anxiety deeply seated within her.
Dressed in
a specific way (the story of her costume is a legendary tale in itself) and
shot exactingly by Hitchcock, Novak is a vision to haunt cinematic
history. However, it took another Vertigo
aficionado to draw attention to another component of her impact: her voice and
line delivery as Madeleine:
Her voice, to me, is one
essential part of Vertigo. When I think about Vertigo, I see a
few flashing images and hear the voice of
Kim Novak. I remember especially the scene at the beach, when
Madeleine tells Scotty about the location of the dream she's
been having ('There's a
tower and a bell and a garden below...'). I have compared that scene (and
others) on the DVD, where
there are dubbed versions in Spanish, in Italian, in French and in
German. None of the dubbed versions match the original, the intensity of it.
And so it
is. Madeleine’s voice is low and silken,
with a strange melodious quality even when delivering ordinary lines, an otherworldly
quality that matches totally what we see of Madeleine visually. Judy’s voice, however, is another thing
altogether. Therein lies the wonder of
Novak’s portrayal.
Hitchcock
did not labour especially over Vertigo, but the film is one of those that took
off on a life of its own, like Casablanca (which was just another one of the
hundreds of films churned out by the studios every year). Vertigo is, in other words, greater than the
sum of its parts, considerable though these individual parts may be. That is why it has affected so many people in
so many different ways.
By the time I was 17
years old, I had seen almost every film in the Alfred Hitchcock canon…and weeks
before the new print of the film arrived in Portland, Oregon I had
nearly memorized the chapter
on Vertigo in John Russell Taylor's biography of the director, “Hitch”…In spite
of my prior research for the movie, I was about as unprepared for Kim Novak's
performance of Madeleine as Pearl
Harbor was for the Kamikaze attack on December 7, 1941. Madeleine
was everything I thought I desired in a woman at
that time, in all of her glorious contradictions: timid, audacious,
intelligent, sophisticated, mysterious, simple, complicated - often all in
the same breath. I
will never forget the devastation of suffering her loss twice in the period of
about 60 minutes. Even after the
movie ended and the house lights came up, I sat in stunned, slack-jawed
silence, my eyes fixed on the curtains covering the movie
screen like a red velvet
burial shroud. People stared at me as they filed out of the theater… For the first time in many years, I
was utterly, completely, moved by a screen performance.
Actually, 'moved' is an understatement. Thanks to Ms. Novak, I was
shoved headlong into an
emotional abyss - one with stucco walls and a tile roof not dissimilar to those
of Mission San Juan
Bautista. In my psyche, Madeleine's bones remain there, twisted
and sun-bleached, to this day.
I saw Vertigo for
the first time somewhere in the mid-eighties. I didn't understand it then. The
concept of losing your loved-one
was too much for me to grasp - I hadn't even been in love by that
time. But a few years ago, when Vertigo was restored, I fell in love
with the film. Now, I had fallen in love, separated and been in love
several times in real
life, so perhaps that's the thing that made me realize the greatness of this
picture. There is something in this
film that moves me deeply every time I sit down to view it. I try not
to do it too often, since I don't want to spoil the experience of
it - once a year is about
enough.
The only
dissatisfying aspect of Vertigo for me is Judy’s fall from the tower at the
end. It comes across as being
perfunctory, disconnected from the rest of the film. I can’t make sense of it, even when seen from
the perspective that this is Scottie’s story.
So, it was interesting to hear that Novak herself understood that Judy
had deliberately jumped to her death.
The fear of not being
loved if she didn’t have on these clothes or wore her hair in a certain way --
oh, god, she had nothing left but to kill herself in the bell tower.
[All
quotations above from the website below, a fascinating interview with Kim
Novak, together with selected audience messages that had been forwarded to her
– a moving affirmation that counters the mostly unappreciative reviews at the
film’s release in 1958, and a moving affirmation of Novak herself, the last
survivor of the creative team of Vertigo, whose own response to the current
fuss over Vertigo is that she regrets that “Jimmy Stewart and Hitch aren’t here
to feel the pride in it”.
Vertigo: a Hitchcock film
A Hitchcock film is always an artistic construct. It is a film.
It is not a slice of life, not a piece of reality. It is an elegantly constructed piece of
artifice. Reading audience responses to
a film like Vertigo can lead readers into thinking otherwise. But there is an elegant balance overall that
Hitchcock’s actors are required to be a part of. There is to be no overt emoting in his
actors, no scenery-chewing performances, no plunging into psychic depths. That was why Hitchcock had trouble with
method actors who attempted to bring method acting into a Hitchcock film. Hitchcock himself tells the story of
Montgomery Clift refusing his directorial instruction to look up into the sky
for a particular shot because his character wouldn’t be looking up into the sky
at that moment (“So I told him he had better”, said Hitchcock with a wry
smile). Kim Novak tells the story of how
the entire final dialogue in the tower had to be delivered to the actual beat
of a metronome for some editing reason or other! Throughout the filming of Vertigo, Hitchcock
never directed either Stewart or Novak in any way except to tell them where to
stand (a fact which Novak herself has confirmed, and which makes one wonder at
the achievements of the entire cast of Vertigo). To him, the actors were just another element
on the set, just like the sets, the props, the lights. No more and no less important.
It is important to understand this for present-day
audiences if they are to approach and appreciate Hitchcock films, especially
those from the late 1950s when method acting in cinema became the accepted
benchmark for what acting should be. The
performances of Novak and Stewart can therefore be especially appreciated for
what was achieved within the elegant balance of a Hitchcock film.
The best film in cinema’s history
Every
decade, the British film monthly Sight
& Sound asks an
international group of film professionals to vote for their greatest film of
all time. Out of the many sources of such lists for films, the Sight &
Sound once-in-a-decade list has come to be regarded as perhaps the most
important. In the 2012 list, Vertigo
dethroned Citizen Kane as number 1, a position which the latter film had held
for 5 decades from 1962-2002. Does
Vertigo deserve this accolade?
Such lists
for films obviously have no objective measure, so we turn to what it
means. Vertigo was released to lukewarm
reviews and was not a commercial success, especially interesting given that
Hitchcock’s reputation and commercial standing was well established by
1958. Its high esteem now reveals more
about the steadily growing emotional response to the film’s themes than about
its qualities as a film per se. In this
sense, it is a popularity poll rather than a poll about objective
phenomena. I am sure it is not the
greatest film ever made, using any cinematic criterion you care to use. All I know is that it has stayed in my mind
ever since I watched it a few months ago.
I see the vision of Kim Novak as she roams the streets of San Francisco,
as she stands in the cemetery looking at a tombstone, hear the clicks of her
heels on the pavements, hear the clicks of James Stewart’s shoes as he tails
her. And I went out to buy my own DVD of
the film today.
Sonny Lim
10 September
2013
[For another insight into Kim Novak’s life and thoughts on
her experience of Vertigo now at age 80, see:
posted by Sonny | 12:53 PM
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