If I do what you tell me, will you love me? ✵ Vertigo - FEAR AND WONDER ✵ 1950–1959 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Thriller

DIRECTOR

Alfred Hitchcock

WRITERS

Alec Coppel, Samuel Taylor (screenplay); Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac (novel)

STARS

James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes

BEFORE

1946 In It’s a Wonderful Life, James Stewart plays to type as a sympathetic everyman.

1948 In Rope, Stewart teams up with Hitchcock for the first of his Technicolor movies.

AFTER

1959 Eva Marie Saint is the next “Hitchcock Blonde,” playing opposite Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

1960 Hitchcock shocks audiences with Psycho.

Director Alfred Hitchcock’s career was a 50-year-long duel with the audience. The more they thought they knew about his work, the more he would use that knowledge against them. He would employ structural devices, narrative twists, and other tricks to give the audience something they had never seen before. While some directors sought to understand the meaning of art or the essence of human relationships, Hitchcock was the great trickster. Audiences could never be sure what was coming next.

Vertigo plays the same games as the rest of Hitchcock’s catalogue, but it has come to stand out as something more complex. It is the story of a retired cop, John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart), who is roped in to an investigation into the mysterious behavior of Madeleine (Kim Novak), the wife of old college friend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore). He becomes obsessed with her, adding an emotional intensity to the movie’s usual magic show.

"My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I’m fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn’t make a good suspense film."

Alfred Hitchcock

The Hitchcock Blonde

As a director, Hitchcock used a certain type of female character in his movies so frequently that she eventually earned her own moniker: “The Hitchcock Blonde.” Although this left him open to accusations of misogyny, it is also true that his movies had more leading roles for women than many in Hollywood. Hitchcock’s blonde was cultured, fashionable, and intelligent, but also icy and initially resistant to the male hero’s charms. Over the course of the movie, the character’s barriers would be broken down and she would end up in awe of the hero, her individualism slightly lost in the process. Hitchock himself indicated that blondes were ideal for creating cinematic suspense, saying in a 1977 TV interview, “Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.”

Vertigo’s lead, Scottie, remakes salesgirl Judy Barton (also played by Kim Novak) in Madeleine’s image. He removes everything that makes Judy an individual in order to have her conform to this visual archetype, a lifeless host for sexual objectification. Scottie’s requirements are hugely specific. He agonizes over the exact shades of gray for Judy’s suit, and is disappointed when she returns home with a hairstyle slightly different from the one he chose (changing her from brunette to blonde). Hitchcock may have put together bloodier sequences, specifically geared around creating tension, but the subtext of emotional abuse in this sequence, along with the notion that it is a self-examination by Hitchcock regarding the way he treats women on film, makes it as unsettling as anything he ever filmed.

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Hitchcock favored icy, “sophisticated blondes” in his movies. “We’re after the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they’re in the bedroom,” he said.

The fallen star

Another common theme in Hitchcock’s movies is the exploration of the concept of the movie star and how it affects the telling of a story, more specifically how stardom could be manipulated to surprise the audience. The most famous example of this is Psycho, in which star Janet Leigh is murdered after just 30 minutes, manipulating audience assumptions of the way stories with stars in leading roles usually progress in order to shock them. But while the twist in Psycho is loud and unavoidable, in Vertigo it is subtle and slow to unfold, and its effect depends on the particular star chosen to play Scottie.

The casting of James Stewart affects the direction and impact of the movie profoundly; it adds an extra textual layer of dissonance to the final act. Stewart’s image as an actor since the days of his early career, including previous roles for Hitchcock in Rear Window (1954) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), had always been that of the incorruptible everyman, decent and likeable to a fault. John “Scottie” Ferguson begins as a good man, a typical Stewart character, but ends it as a man lost in sexual despair, his mind ruined by tragedy. By putting James Stewart through this transformation, Hitchcock is not just undoing a man, he’s undoing a screen icon. What we think we know of Stewart’s character makes Ferguson’s psychosis that much more painful to watch, and his unraveling affects us that much more deeply. The visual representation of this process is never more clear than in a dream sequence that sees Stewart’s disembodied head spiraling down into an abyss. His usual clean-cut image is distorted as a wind unsettles his hair and his expression. He looks lost.

He did nothing. The law has little to say on things left undone.”

Coroner / Vertigo

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Scottie (James Stewart) is a police officer seen in a rooftop chase at the start of the movie. He slips, and a colleague falls while trying to help him. This is the start of his vertigo.

Twisted thriller

Vertigo is an expertly crafted thriller, but one with twisted perspectives. The villain’s murderous plan succeeds, the love story is poisoned by lies, and the protagonist is broken emotionally and physically. It is arguably the darkest movie the director ever made. It is a Hitchcock movie with no Hollywood obligations, as the director seeks a richer form of terror—not simply to shock, repulse, or unsettle the audience, but to disturb them, to take everything they think they know about his style of filmmaking and to corrupt it to reveal something new.

In Vertigo, Hitchcock bares a little bit more of his soul so that he can twist the knife a little bit deeper.

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Scottie and Madeleine (Kim Novak) first embrace after she has asked him whether she is crazy. Judy, as Madeleine, has fallen for Scottie, and it is this that will ultimately lead to her downfall.

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This poster shows the spiral motif that features in Scottie’s nightmare, and which recurs with the staircase and in Madeleine’s hairstyle.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK Director

Hitchcock was born in London in 1899. He started in the movie industry as a set designer. His first chance to direct came with the incomplete movie Number 13, and then in 1925 The Pleasure Garden. After gaining fame as a director in Britain with such movies as The Lady Vanishes (1938), Hitchcock moved to Hollywood in 1940, when he was hired by David O. Selznick to direct an adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. He went on to have a 30-year career in Hollywood, directing classics such as Rear Window (1954), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho, and The Birds. He died in 1980, at the age of 81.

Key movies

1929 Blackmail

1951 Strangers on a Train

1958 Vertigo

1960 Psycho

1963 The Birds

What else to watch: Laura (1944) ✵ Spellbound (1945) ✵ Rear Window (1954) ✵ North by Northwest (1959) ✵ La jetée (1962) ✵ Marnie (1964) ✵ Bad Education (2004)