Encountering Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” for the first time

(Written in 2013, uploaded on 22 Nov 2014)

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”.

http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/kim_novak_c.html]

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:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/9586303/Kim-Novak-tells-all.html]