Vertigo

Charles Barr

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781839021084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Vertigo (1958) is widely regarded as not only one of Hitchcock's best films, but one of the greatest films of world cinema. Made at the time when the old studio system was breaking up, it functions both as an embodiment of the supremely seductive visual pleasures that 'classical Hollywood' could offer and – with the help of an elaborate plot twist – as a laying bare of their dangerous dark side. The film's core is a study in romantic obsession, as James Stewart's Scottie pursues Madeleine/Judy (Kim Novak) to her death in a remote Californian mission. Novak is ice cool but vulnerable, Stewart – in the darkest role of his career – genial on the surface but damaged within. Although it can be seen as Hitchcock's most personal film, Charles Barr argues that, like Citizen Kane, Vertigo is at the same time a triumph not so much of individual authorship as of creative collaboration. He highlights the crucial role of screenwriters Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor and, by a combination of textual and contextual analysis, explores the reasons why Vertigo continues to inspire such fascination. In his foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Barr looks afresh at Vertigo alongside the recently-rediscovered 'lost' silent The White Shadow (1924), scripted by Hitchcock, which also features the trope of the double, and at the acclaimed contemporary silent film The Artist (2011), which pays explicit homage to Vertigo in its soundtrack.

1 Obsession

‘It’s one of the most stunning entrances in all of cinema’: Edward Buscombe wrote this of John Wayne in Stagecoach (1939), in the very first sentence of the first book in this BFI Film Classics series.⁸ Equally stunning is the entrance of Kim Novak in Vertigo.

It is an entrance of a very different kind. ‘We hear a shot, and cut suddenly to Ringo standing by the trail, twirling his rifle. “Hold it”, cries the unmistakable voice of John Wayne. The camera dollies quickly in …’. Wayne is male, active, vocal, about to impose himself forcefully on the narrative. Novak is female, passive, silent, offering herself as an object to the male gaze.

The gaze is that of Scottie, a retired detective, played by James Stewart. An old college acquaintance, Gavin Elster, has asked him to trail his wife, Madeleine, who has been acting mysteriously. Scottie is reluctant, but agrees to come that evening to the restaurant, Ernie’s, where the couple are dining, in order to have a discreet look at her. An establishing shot of the restaurant exterior is followed by a close shot of Scottie at the bar, looking intently over his shoulder into the space of the room.

The obvious way to develop this would be to satisfy our curiosity by cutting at once to his point of view, and an image of Madeleine. But we are, with Scottie, kept waiting. First, the camera pulls back from his face, and leftwards, in a smooth movement that loses him from the right of the frame, and takes up a central vantage point on the dining room. It pauses, as if hesitating, then begins slowly to move in; at the same moment, a romantic musical theme begins also, reinforcing the sumptuousness both of the camera movement and of the décor, the dominant colours of which are deep red and blue and gold. The inward movement centres a particular table, at which we recognise Gavin Elster, with a blonde woman, who must be Madeleine: we see her from behind, her elegant black and turquoise outfit leaving her back exposed.

Scottie strains to get his first view of Madeleine …

Only now do we return to Scottie, and then to his point of view as the couple, deep in the frame, start to get up and move towards where he is sitting. A pattern of alternation develops, cutting between him and his view of them, until Madeleine pauses, in profile, in front of him, so close to him that he has, in the next shot, to turn away, towards the bar, to avoid the danger of attracting her attention – or is it also that he is dazzled, blinded, by her beauty? Alternate close-ups continue, as she waits for her coat and he looks away. Only when she and Elster walk away from him to the exit is he free to resume his gaze.

Dissolve to Scottie at the wheel of his parked car, waiting for her to come out of her apartment the next day, so that he can follow her. He has, then, taken the job, and we don’t need to be told that he has done so, or why. His first look at her has been decisive.

He is not the only one to be captivated. The scene has also indulged, in a pointed way, two other forms of gaze. First, that of the camera/director, in the voluptuously elaborate shot that first discovered Madeleine. Second, that of the audience: when Scottie has to look away, we are privileged to go on looking at Madeleine in close-up, in unobserved impunity. Of course these three kinds of look, those of director, character and audience, commonly go together in narrative cinema; one of the founding documents of modern film theory, Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, is based on precisely this point.⁹ The mechanism of the point-of-view (POV) shot allows director and spectator to enjoy the same voyeuristic gaze at the female that the male hero does; for both, the character acts as a kind of surrogate. It is no surprise that Mulvey uses as the prime illustration of her thesis the director of Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, supreme manipulator of POV structures. ‘In Hitchcock … the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees.’ This is true of much of Vertigo, but not of the crucial scene that introduces Madeleine, which so deftly separates out the three looks of voyeuristic fascination – those of director/camera, then character, then audience – as if to insist that ‘we are all in this together’. And then, the next day, Scottie starts trailing her, and the classic three-in-one mechanism clicks into place, and continues with an intensity that can have few if any parallels in the history of cinema: lengthy sequences where Scottie follows Madeleine and we see, in a hypnotically protracted alternation of shots, exactly the images of her that he sees. It is not until nearly thirty minutes after her entry into the film that we and Scottie will hear her speak, and twenty of those minutes have been devoted to Scottie’s trailing of her.

This pattern is at the root of what is special about Vertigo. It draws in, and indulges, the pleasurable gaze with extraordinary fullness, and at the same time foregrounds the mechanisms behind it – first by taking them apart, then by pushing them to an extreme. Indeed the plot, when fully revealed, will turn out to foreground these mechanisms still more decisively at the level of narrative, hinging as it does on the discovery that the entire scenario of surveillance has been a devious construction, set up by Gavin Elster with the woman’s connivance and with Scottie as victim. Kim Novak is not simply, as a first viewing suggests, playing for Hitchcock the role of a woman being voyeuristically observed; she is playing, for Hitchcock, the part of a woman who is playing, for Elster, the part of a woman being voyeuristically observed. Absorbing at first viewing, when we don’t know the full plot, these scenes become even more so when overlaid by the bittersweet awareness that, with Scottie, we have been, and are now again allowing ourselves to be, led on, deceived, by a consummate manipulator, complaisant victims of what has all along been – like all cinema – an illusory construction. If at one level Hitchcock = Scottie = spectator, it is plausible, and by no means incompatible, also to align Hitchcock and Elster, as directors of the calculated apparatus of illusion to which Scottie and the viewer are submitted. (It is an index of Hitchcock’s concern for the precise management of the ‘look’ in this scene at Ernie’s that he tinkered with it at the last minute, as recalled by Associate Producer Herbert Coleman in the laserdisc edition of the film. In the script, as Madeleine waits to exit the restaurant, ‘Her eyes come to rest on Scottie for a moment’, and it was shot this way, but Hitchcock then decided that this might risk giving a premature hint to audiences of the trap that was being laid. He therefore substituted another shot of her head turning, directed by Coleman during Hitchcock’s absence on holiday in Jamaica. The original shot can be glimpsed in the film’s trailer, prefixed to the video release of the restored version.)

Elster ‘directs’ Scottie

We are, indeed, ‘all in it together’, director and cast, characters and viewers, caught up in the beautiful illusory construction. This story of a man who develops a romantic obsession with the image of an enigmatic woman has commonly been seen, by his colleagues as well as by critics and biographers, as one that engaged Hitchcock in an especially profound way; and it has exerted a comparable fascination on many of its viewers. After first seeing it as a teenager in 1958, Donald Spoto had gone back for twenty-six more viewings by the time he wrote The Art of Alfred Hitchcock in 1976.¹⁰ In a 1996 magazine article, Geoffrey O’Brien cites other cases of ‘permanent fascination’ with Vertigo, and then casually reveals that he himself, starting at age fifteen, has seen it ‘at least thirty times’.¹¹ No other film has inspired such a flow of pilgrims to its locations. Spoto’s book records perhaps the first such systematic pilgrimage; writing for the San Francisco Magazine in 1982, Lynda Myles and Michael Goodwin anatomised and recommended the ‘Vertigo Tour’, and countless fans have followed that tour since, as I did myself in 1997 (how else could I have presumed to write this book?).¹²

All this obsessiveness has been intensified by the elusive status of the film itself. It soon became hard to see it in a good print; in England at least, after its initial release, its most frequent screenings were in 16mm library prints, in black and white only. Then it became hard to see it at all, anywhere. The rights to Vertigo, as to four other features – Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Trouble with Harry (1955), and the second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) – reverted to the Hitchcock estate, which withheld them for more than a decade, on either side of Hitchcock’s death in 1980. Like Myles and Goodwin, I have vivid memories of a one-off screening in 1981, in Norfolk rather than, in their case, California, laid on, illicitly of course, by a collector. We gazed at the film with the intentness of Scottie gazing at Madeleine, not knowing if we would ever see it again, ever truly possess it. Then, along with the other four titles, it was re-released in 1983, and widely re-reviewed. But even when this was followed by video release, the special aura around the film was not dispelled: a restoration was in progress, with the goal of recapturing the visual and aural splendour of the original production in Vista Vision (‘Mo...