VERTIGO

Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958

   

PITCH: Woman as embodiment of a hidden, male rescue-fantasy.

 

STORY: A fat, short, bald director (Hitchcock) has a popular movie star, Jimmy Stewart, rejected by a cool platinum blonde Kim Novak. Stewart gets pissed; Novak falls to her death. His illness is cured. The film was passed over by the Academy for Gigi about a young woman trained to be a courtesan of a wealthy suitor. 

HOOK: This movie is the beginning of the end for Hitchcock (he would only do Marnie, Psycho and The Birds afterwards). The Sixties would reject big studios, big stars, big (fat, short, bald) directors, and here we see Hitch making a pre-emptive strike by starting to reject us. He takes the quintessential learn-from-your-mistakes, It’s a Wonderful Life guy and hangs him between life and death by a bent gutter—literally at the beginning, figuratively at the end. His friend Midge with a career designing brassieres is a maternal figure who desires him to be a more mature “big boy,” which he ultimately rejects. 

 

JOHN: Three things strike me 50 years later. 1) the shoulder-less Steward delivers real angst in his last scene. 2) With Paris Hilton, Brittney Spears and Lindsay Lohan we have come full circle—can a new Sixties be around the corner? And 3) The real genius of this film is in its pacing: It starts with a chase, but slows to an endless, dialogue-free, stalking of Novak through a San Francisco of meandering streets, a bridge to nowhere and classical facades suggesting eternal themes. The plot unwinds with half-expected surprises, but the ending is abrupt. We don’t have time to process it. We panic. This genuine, metaphysical moment shared by actor, director and audience transcends Hitchcock’s body of otherwise interesting but overly manipulative work. Bernard Herrmann’s music, yes; Saul Bass’s opening titles, no.  

 

 GO GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four)  

 

SPANKY: A revisit to this classic (it is Voyeurism 201; the earlier Rear Windowwas Voyeurism 101) reveals that the James Stewart character has no past and the Kim Novak woman too much of one (Novak is pretending to be Judy pretending to be Madeleine pretending to be Carlotta—too bad none of them can act). Animals have feelings too you know, but we don’t project them on other animals and then get pissed because they are deceiving us. Jimmy “yup,” “yup” Stewart should simply smell Kim’s butt and avoid high places. Laugh if you like but isn’t necrophilia a little creepy? 

 

“TWO PAWS UP” (3 BARKs out of four) 

 

KEEPER: “Don’t touch me; I just put on my face.”