I go but I return: I would I were
The pilot of the darkness and the dream
-Tennyson
With Alma so recently home from
the hospital, Hitchcock may not have been in the mood for the
rigors of promoting Vertigo. The cancer scare may have taken much
of the joy out of the prospect of showing his film to the media; on
the other hand, it may have provided a much-needed distraction.
Whatever mix of emotions Hitchcock had to deal with, this part of
the filmmaking process, the selling of the film, was one of the
most important parts-and one that a filmmaker neglected at his
peril.
As a young man, at a meeting of the Hate Club (a loose organization of filmmakers united by their dissatisfaction with the popular cinema of the time), he had created a stir by admitting that he made his films for the press. "The critics were the only ones who could give one freedom," he recalled, "direct the public what to see." They had all laughed at him then, but few of those Hate Club members were around to laugh at him by 1958. Hitchcock's success had vindicated his attitude. He had gained the freedom and power he wanted, in large part through his wise use of publicity. Over the course of his career, it was never so much a question of garnering good reviews-although they were important, and, for Hitchcock, usually in plentiful supply-as of cultivating the well placed feature story. Page after page of newspaper and magazine copy sold his films, his stars, and even himself as a director to the public. Hitchcock never ignored this aspect of the filmmaker's career; it was just as important as the filming itself-especially now that he had to compete against his own efforts on television. Why should people go out to the theater for a Hitchcock film when they could stay in and see one for free?
Selling Vertigo was a responsibility not to be ignored; as demanding as his personal life may have been, he would be in San Francisco for the film's premiere.
"Hitchcock designated San Francisco as the place to premiere it,"
Paramount publicity head Herb Steinberg recalled. "He designated
who he would like to have there for the opening, who would lend
most to the publicity of the film, and he also was very, very
helpful in the design of the advertising.
"When we finally had the premiere of the picture, we brought in newspaper people from all over the country to San Francisco. And among them were the syndicated columnists. We had coverage in most of the newspapers in the country and in some around the world."
Before the premiere, Paramount publicity released stories on the
film almost every week. Most were puff pieces on the stars, and
much was made of the supposed "feud" between Hitchcock and Novak.
In one release, Novak denied there was a feud, and she claimed she
was actually organizing a Hitchcock fan club on the set. Gossip
columnists dutifully picked up publicity-fed stories about roses
being delivered daily to Novak's dressing room from a mysterious
admirer (allegedly Cary Grant).
In April, The Hollywood
Reporter commented on an interesting gamble the filmmakers were
making: allocating a large chunk of their advertising budget to
college and high-school newspapers.
It is the first time any film
company ever has allocated such a ballyhoo sum ($10,000) for campus
media, completely distinct from magazines which have youth
readership. Paramount and Hitchcock are aiming at the broadening
film going market comprising teenagers. In making the school
newspapers' buy, Paramount is after a package deal. In one issue
appears the ad; in the subsequent issue appears a publicity plant
dealing with the picture; the two are tied into one
deal.
In addition to the school newspaper
campaign, full-color ads announcing the film appeared in Life,
Look, Seventeen, and Fan List. The ads alternated different tag
lines; most were built around conventional-looking images of the
stars, rather than on the Bass/Whitney poster graphic that has come
to represent the film to modern audiences.
Anticipating the more structured and
strict campaign for Psycho, ads for Vertigo flaunted the
storytelling strategy that had so recently threatened to disrupt
the production team: "When you have seen Vertigo, don't tell anyone
the great secret of the story!" Other ads used the Whitney spirals
as a motif: "Hitchcock creates a whirling, swirling vortex of
suspense," they declared. "Alfred Hitchcock engulfs you in a
whirlpool of terror and tension." In keeping with Paramount's high
expectations for the film, Saul Bass posters for Vertigo boldly
declared it "Alfred Hitchcock's Masterpiece."
TV spots also ran at the end of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and there were print ads in the director's mystery magazine. And there were other, more specialized promotions: Theater owners were encouraged to give roses to Novak lookalikes, and they were promised a single with Jay Livingstone and Ray Evans's Vertigo song (recorded by Billy Eckstine) on one side and Herrmann's "Prelude" and love theme from the sound track on the flip. No opportunity, it seemed, was left unexploited.
Hitchcock planned an elaborate press tour for the film's May ninth opening. Journalists mingled with the actors and Hitchcock at a cocktail party in the Clift Hotel (where all of the out-of-town journalists were put up) in the afternoon. The menu for the cocktail party was printed in French, a nod to the film's source material.
After cocktails, the party
moved to the Stage Door Theater, a 440-seat art house, for
Vertigo's first public showing; afterward, the journalists were
bussed to Ernie's for a late dinner. After a dinner of "La Noisette
de Boeuf Victoria avec Sauce Madere" and an appropriate wine,
die-hards were invited to the Venetian room at the Fairmont Hotel,
where Dorothy Shay entertained.
That was the official publicity. But
there was more, no doubt to Hitchcock's annoyance.
The very next morning, Kim Novak held a special press conference of
her own-the subject: a breaking scandal concerning her relationship
with a Dominican Republic official.
With unfortunate timing, Novak had managed to become involved in an
international incident on the eve of the film's premiere.
According to newspaper accounts at the time, she had been dating
Lt. Gen. Rafael Trujillo, Jr., son of the leader of the Dominican
Republic. During this relationship, she received several
high-priced gifts from the leader's son-including, allegedly, a
Mercedes-Benz. A columnist from the Los Angeles Times described the
morning:
Saturday I was rousted out of bed to attend the press
conference with Miss Novak-of whom I'd already been advised that
"Kim Novak's fondness for lavender will be fulfilled in her
beautiful suite at the Clift---lavender-scented, etc., etc." At the
conference, devoted to the now famous unlavender foreign car, gift
of Trujillo, Miss Novak looked unhappy. I have news for her-at
least one person in the room was unhappier than she.
Over Dick Williams's Monday-morning column in the Mirror-News ran
the headline KIM'S PEACEFUL WEEKEND SHATTERED. After describing the
lavish opening activities on Friday evening, Williams described the
next morning in some detail:
And on Saturday morning at 7 Am., a curious wire service
correspondent was banging noisily on the door of Kim's 13th floor
Clift hotel suite. She wanted to confirm the Trujillo gift
story.
But Kim's publicity girl wasn't buying any, thanks. No, Kim wasn't
talking. She was sleeping. Finally, she got rid of the reporter by
asking her to come back an hour later.
In the interim, the long distance wires were humming between the
suite and Hollywood headquarters and Kim hurriedly arose. It was
decided to hold a press conference at 10:30.
Kim looked very sharp in a red outfit at the conference and she
handled the questions reasonably well. Every time she got off the
party line, her publicist reminded her crisply, "Just a statement,
Kim, just a statement."
And when prying reporters kept boring in and wanting to know how
Kim thought that Mercedes-Benz was a temporary loan when she signed
the bill of sale, her representative just cut the whole thing off
and took her away.
It had been a busy year for Kim
Novak. While Hitchcock was in Jamaica, a storm of publicity
surrounded her alleged love affair with, and impending marriage to,
Sammy Davis, Jr. Harry Cohn was so shocked that he left a party in
New York and flew back to the studio to manage the crisis. Cohn
used everything in his power to end their relationship; he
threatened to fire Novak and use his influence to keep Davis from
working anywhere in Vegas, and the couple's relationship ended
almost immediately.
The Davis crisis may have been
too much for Cohn, who was seen taking nitroglycerin tablets for
his heart condition when he heard the news. He died of a heart
attack at the end of February.
While Novak was fending off the scandal-hungry press, another contingent of reporters was spending the morning on a tour of Vertigo locations with Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart, who was just as committed to his own publicity as the director was to his. The junket included stops at Fort Point and Mission Dolores, where the mock headstone of Carlotta Valdes still rested in the cemetery (according to several locals, the headstone would remain there for several years).
The Los Angeles Times writer described the scene during the tours,
which had its share of technical problems:
At noon Hitch, who is partial
to travelogues, took us on a tour of the picture's location spots,
from a florist's to the Mission Dolores and the Presidio. We rode
in brand new cars (domestic), two of which broke down before we
reached the top of Nob Hill. Hitch had set up a fake slab for a
Vertigo scene in a quaintly picturesque cemetery adjoining the
mission. There was one tiny tombstone (real) that I can't forget.
It read, "Our Little Treasure-4 months and 16 days," and carried
the name of a baby girl who died more than a century ago.
Another Los Angeles paper reported on Hitchcock's interaction with
fans at the stops:
When our caravan stopped at the florist shop where a number of the
Vertigo scenes had been filmed, an elderly woman shoved her way
through the crowd to Hitchcock's side.
"Say Dearie, you look much better in person than you do on
television," she told him. Later, I asked Hitch how he liked the
publicity junket routine.
The pudgy little director shrugged his shoulders.
"You have to do it these days. It used to be that when you were
finished filming your work was done-you were home safe. But today,
you have to follow through. You have to go out and sell the picture
with stunts like this. So, I guess I'll have to get used to people
asking me how much money I make and telling me how I don't look
quite so bad in person."
But it was the Novak/Trujillo
story that garnered most of the headlines.
Monday morning's column about
the film mentioned the scandal prominently, and the news sections
devoted substantial space to the relationship between the actress
and the general's son. The scandal lay not in the mere fact of the
gifts-after all, Novak was no public official; it was hardly a
crime for her to receive presents-but, at just the moment Congress
was debating increasing aid to the Dominican Republic, reporters
and politicians found it reasonable to wonder where
the son of this tiny island nation's head of state was getting the
money to give away expensive imported cars.
The scandal persisted until the eve of the New York premiere at the end of May, when the younger Trujillo finally said farewell to Novak. Amid waning rumors of marriage, the lieutenant general returned to the army's school at Fort Leavenworth, and the affair was ended as swiftly as the Sammy Davis imbroglio had been.
Despite all the distraction, the film did garner mostly positive
notices from the local papers covering the premiere. One critic,
Jack Moffitt of The Hollywood Reporter, published a particularly
astute and prescient review on May twelfth:
Alfred Hitchcock tops his own
fabulous record for suspense. Aside from being big box office, it
is a picture no filmmaker should miss if only to observe the
pioneering techniques achieved by Hitchcock and his
co-workers....
The measure of a great director lies in his ability to inspire his
associates to rise above their usual competence and Hitchcock
exhibits absolute genius in doing this in Vertigo....
Stewart gives what I consider the finest performance of his career
as the detective. He portrays obsession to the point of mania
without the least bit of hamming or scenery chewing. Miss Novak has
become a fine actress.... Barbara Bel Geddes comes into her
own....
The skill with which Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor constructed
their screenplay ... proves two things-l) that an audience will buy
any startling change in human behavior if you give it time (with
montages and subtle buildups) to believe the transitions and: 2)
that a murder mystery can be the greatest form of emotional drama
if one concentrates on the feelings of the characters rather than
the plot mathematics....
Vertigo is one of the most fascinating love stories ever
filmed.
Moffitt singled out the
contributions of most of the technical staff in this review, an
exceptionally detailed and perceptive piece of trade criticism. And
its tone was echoed by other organs: Film Daily's reviewer wrote
that "all in all, the picture is an artistic and entertainment
triumph," scoring the direction as "excellent" and the photography
as "tops." The Motion Picture Herald also rated the film as
"excellent." The Herald made special mention of Novak, saying that
the actress had found a "new plateau in her career through the
expert guidance of the 'master of suspense.'''
But there was dissent, even
from the beginning. Variety (5/14/58), which also predicted big box
office for the film, praised the locations and "Hitchcock's
directorial hand, cutting, angling and using a jillion gimmicks
with mastery." But the Variety critic qualified his praise with one
major complaint, the gist of which ran directly counter to
Moffitt's analysis in the Reporter:
Unfortunately, however, even
that mastery isn't enough to overcome one major fault, for plain
fact is that film's first half is too slow and too long. This may
be because Hitchcock became overly enamored with Frisco's
vertiginous beauty, and the Alec Coppel-Samuel Taylor screenplay
... just takes too long to get off the ground....
By [the film's climax] Vertigo is more than two hours old, and it's
questionable whether that much time should be devoted to what is
basically only a psychological murder mystery.
The reviewer concluded that the
film "looks like a winner at the box office," but he had settled
on an objection that would dog Vertigo's nationwide reception-its
languorous length and pace.
The word outside the trade
presses tended to follow Variety's lead. The Los Angeles newspapers
held their reviews until the film's general release at the end of
the month. In the May twenty-ninth Los Angeles Times, Philip K.
Scheuer sounded the tone that most popular critics would take with
the film:
VERTIGO INDUCES SAME IN WATCHER
Someone has described the latter-day Alfred Hitchcock film as a
thrillorama. This is as handy a way as any to sloganize Hitchcock's
Vertigo, which is part thriller and part panorama (of San
Francisco). Except for a few startling dramatic moments the scenery
has it....
In plot outline it is fascinating-Hitchcock has dabbled in a new,
for him, dimension: the dream-but he has taken too long to unfold
it.
The twice-told theme, hard to grasp at best, bogs down further in a
maze of detail; and the spectator experiences not only some of the
vertigo afflicting James Stewart, the hero, but also-and worse the
indifference. (Was Scheuer really characterizing Stewart's
character as "indifferent"?]
Blonde or brunette, Kim is not a remarkable actress, but she does
manage a creditable physical differentiation between Madeleine and
Judy. I was bothered by the fact that I could catch almost nothing
that Madeleine said (Stewart was guilty of some mumbling, too). I
had no trouble understanding the more raucous
Judy.
The Los Angeles Citizen-News
(5/29/58) concurred, but felt the picture had more serious problems
in the story department:
Unfortunately, the story, as
adapted for the screen comes off less praiseworthy, for most of the
time the picture is not a little confusing. The story line is not
easy to follow. ...
Vertigo is technically a topnotch film. Storywise, little can be
said. Hitchcock does as well as he can, considering the script, in
a directorial capacity. Vertigo is not his best picture.
Hazel Flynn, critic for the
Beverly Hills Citizen, characterized the film as "middling
Hitchcock." She wrote, "It has some extraordinary items in it but,
once the plot has begun to 'round, not even the director himself,
apparently, quite knew how to get off the treadmill." She added,
however, that even minor Hitchcock was "head and shoulders above
the photoplays of many other directors."
The reviews weren't all bad.
The Los Angeles Times’ main competitor, the
Los Angeles Examiner, found no fault in the film, although Ruth
Waterbury conceded that "you may feel it starts slowly
....”
She continued:
"There are two vivid stars in Vertigo, and both
of them are displayed at the top of their form. One is Kim Novak,
the actress, and the other is Alfred Hitchcock, the director. In
their quite different styles neither of them has ever been more
intriguing.... Vertigo may well make you dizzy, but it surely won't
bore you-if you like excitement, action, romance, glamor [sic] and
a crazy, off-beat love story."
Vertigo premiered in New York
at the Capitol the same weekend it opened in Los Angeles at the
Paramount. Sam Taylor remembers the screening-especially the
red-carpet treatment he received:
"This was in 1958, and when we
approached the Capitol we had to slow down to a crawl because there
were a lot of limousines in front of us, obviously with famous
people, and there was a whole crowd, naturally, of people who are
always at premieres with autograph books and
things.
"People would come out of the
limousines, there would be a great cheer, and they would be
attacked, and there was a red carpet. Finally our limousine drove
up in front of the Palace and the red carpet and the crowd of
autograph people surged forward and somebody opened the door for us
and one of the crowd stuck his head in and looked at us and said,
'Nobody!' So there you are."
Cue panned the film severely on
the thirty-first of May:
There was a time when Alfred
Hitchcock did nothing but turn out 70-80-90
minute movie masterpieces. They were taut, terrifying exercises in
suspense-manhunt melodramas, eerie tales of murder done and
detected, killings thwarted, dangers evaded, and horrifying flights
into the miasmic maze of disordered minds.
As director Hitchcock grew
more successful, his producers grew more generous. They put more
footage in his films, and greater production values. Hitch broke
the rhythm of his melodramas to make side excursions into scenic
beauties and romantic bypaths, elaborately dwelling on lavish
settings, costumes and similar appurtenances. He became entranced
by method rather than mood, style rather than substance, gimmicks
rather than grim melodramatics, and his pictures became elaborate
chess problems-in which frequently the beauty of the pieces rather
than their moves seemed to fascinate him.
Vertigo is a two-hours-and-eight-minutes case in point.
The New Yorker, whose review ran on June seventh, was equally
unimpressed. John McCarten summarized his review: "Alfred
Hitchcock, who produced and directed this thing, has never before
indulged in such farfetched nonsense." This same contempt was
echoed later by Time magazine's memorable label for the film:
"another Hitchcock and bull story."
But not all the East Coast coverage was bad. And the bad reviews
were, for the most part, attributable to the critics' confusion
over the admittedly complex plot.
Richard Griffith, in a June
seventeenth Los Angeles Times story headlined VERTIGO PLEASES NEW
YORK, wrote that the critics "don't want to spoil audience
enjoyment by tipping off any of the master's little surprises-but
since a Hitchcock film consists almost exclusively of said
surprises, there is little else for reviewers to say than see it
for yourself."
Griffith summarized the majority opinion on the film as "a treat
for all of his fans and for many who do not even know his
name."
Those involved in the making of
the film also found the finished product to be everything they had
expected. Taylor, who hadn't done much film work before Vertigo,
remembered being pleased by what he saw. "I thought the film was
very good and I was pleased with it. But I didn't go around saying
that I had just written a masterpiece or anything like that-and
neither did Hitchcock, for that matter; at least he didn't say so.
It was a normal reaction-1 thought, It's a good picture and I'm
pleased with it. As Hitchcock would say, 'It's just another
movie.'
"But I don't remember any
jumping up and down, and as a matter of fact, you know very well it
wasn't hailed with hosannas. I think a lot of people were puzzled
by it. It was just a Hitchcock picture that seemed to be a little
different for Hitchcock."
Herbert Coleman liked the film,
though, like many others on the Paramount team, he admitted that
it wasn't his favorite Hitchcock film: To Catch a Thief, doubtless
a more exotic filmmaking experience for those involved, remained
the close-knit group's favorite.
In a note to Hitchcock sent during the summer of 1958, animator
John Ferren praised the movie:
I liked Vertigo, both as a
picture and my sequence. I saw it twice. The first time I was put
out by some technical roughnesses, the second time I thought that
it had a real kick and was fine in and for the story. Incidentally
Bob Burks photographed the thing (I mean the entire picture)
beautifully. My home town never looked so good.... My feet are clay
enough to have enjoyed seeing my screen credit up there bigger
than life.
Saul Bass, who later won an award for his design work on Vertigo, wrote to Hitchcock after the film's release:
"I'd like to take this
opportunity to thank you for providing me a framework within which
I could produce something of worth. I do hope I may have the
opportunity to work with you again."
If grosses are any indication of success, Vertigo was neither winner nor loser. It finished twenty-first in 1958 ticket sales, with $3.2 million-the equivalent of approximately $7 million in 1997 dollars. This was about $2 million off what Hitchcock had made on Rear Window ($5.3 million) and what he would take in on North by Northwest ($5.5 million), but better than The Wrong Man-a ranking that accurately reflected each film's relative commercial nature.
The 1958 figure does not account for overseas sales. The final cost
of making Vertigo ran to $2,479,000-which means it garnered
something like $1 million in domestic box-office profit on its
first outing. Of the final price, Paramount picked up
$2,004,722.49 and Hitchcock Productions paid $443,307. None of
these figures include Hitchcock's or Stewart's salaries, which were
based on an undisclosed percentage of the film's
grosses.
The real money was in the ownership of the film. Hitchcock's contract gave Paramount an eight-year lease on five of the films, after which the rights would revert to Hitchcock. Paramount re-released Vertigo and Rear Window in 1963 to playoff the release of The Birds, but no figures are available for this second run. There was another release after the rights reverted to Hitchcock in the late sixties, through Universal, and then a sale to television. After the early seventies, the film was pulled from release, along with the other Paramount films Hitchcock owned (The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Rope, which Hitchcock had financed through his own short-lived company, Transatlantic Pictures). Psycho, Hitchcock's last Paramount film, was sold to Universal in 1968, when the rights returned to Hitchcock.
Vertigo had very limited availability in the early seventies, and
then disappeared completely from distribution in 1974. Why? There
was no compelling legal or financial reason. According to Herman
Citron, Hitchcock's agent, the decision was personal. Hitchcock
refused inquiries from colleges and film societies that requested
it for screenings. He wasn't so restrictive with the other titles
(two of which he donated in 16mm reductions to a prominent eastern
university), but with Vertigo, he was far more
protective.
If Hitchcock's intention was to set aside a nest egg for his family
by keeping Vertigo and the other films off the market, the decision
was wise. The director's career may have been on the wane in the
sixties and seventies-certainly his last great film was Mamie,
which has deeply divided critics over the years-but his critical
reputation was approaching its zenith.
There is an odd parallel between the period of the director's
critical rise and the decline of his new work. In 1958, Hitchcock
was an economically successful director. His pictures turned
profits and his personal recognition skyrocketed with his popular
television series.
But despite his artistic
pretenses as a young director in England, Hitchcock was never
considered a "serious" filmmaker by American critics. When their
personalities lent themselves to the enterprise, directors like
Hitchcock were used as advertising labels for films, but that was
as far as the auteur theory went in America's consciousness: There
simply was no serious domestic critical community available to
celebrate cinematic artists.
Nineteen fifty-eight, though, was a turning point for both
Hitchcock and art cinema. In France, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer
had published in 1957 the first book-length critical assessment of
Hitchcock-Hitchcock: Classiques du Cinema. The book ended with The
Wrong Man (what a difference a few years would have made); though
it was unavailable in English until the late sixties (Hitchcock:
The First Forty-four Films, translated by Stanley Hochman) their
work was extremely influential.
One of Chabrol and Rohmer's
fellow filmmakers, Françoise Truffaut, was also a Hitchcock
admirer. After a brief meeting with Hitchcock during one of the
master's visits to France, Truffaut proposed conducting a series of
interviews to discuss the genesis of all of Hitchcock's films. The
celebrated Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews (comprising fifty hours in
all) began during the postproduction of The Birds and the start of
production on Mamie. Published in book form-first in France in
1966, then in 1968 in the United States-the interviews treated
Hitchcock's career with a sense of continuity and purpose, with
Truffaut insightfully tracing recurring themes and establishing
core films (The Lodger, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Shadow of a
Doubt, Notorious, Rear Window).
Surprisingly, both directors
had remarkably little to say about Vertigo.
Hitchcock acknowledged defects
within the picture, and he groused slightly about Novak's
performance (over which Truffaut enthused). The overall impression
that Hitchcock gave was that Vertigo had failed him. But Hitchcock
the auteur of 1962 was the same man who had worried over the
box-office receipts for The Wrong Man just before mounting
Vertigo-indeed, the same man who had shocked the Hate Club decades
before with his pledge of allegiance to the critics-and he remained
quick to criticize films that offered no box-office or critical
satisfaction. After all, what other judgment was there to trust? To
the entertainer, the audience and the critics have the final say:
No matter how secure one may feel in a performance, it's the level
of applause that determines success.
But years after the mixture of
applause and complaint that greeted Vertigo had died down;
Hitchcock's most personal film began to attract an extraordinary
level of renewed critical interest. Among several books written
during the director's last years that examined the Hitchcock canon,
by far the most important---both in general and in the special
attention it paid to Vertigo-was Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films
(1965).
Wood began his analysis with a fundamental question: "Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?" His response made well-reasoned comparisons to another great English entertainer: William Shakespeare. Wood argued that Hitchcock's films showed a "consistent development, deepening and clarification," that there was an overall unity to his work that transcended the merits of each individual film.
"But within this unity-and this
is something which rarely receives the emphasis it deserves-another
mark of Hitchcock's stature is the amazing variety of his work ...
consider merely Hitchcock's last five films, made within a period
of seven years, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds,
Marnie .... True, he never invents
his own plots, but adapts the work of others: again, one cannot
resist invoking Shakespeare. Hitchcock is no more limited by his
sources than Shakespeare was by his. The process whereby Greene's
romance Pandosto was transformed into the great poetic drama of The
Winter's Tale is not unlike that whereby Boileau and Narcejac's
D'Entre les Morts became Vertigo: there is the same kind of
relationship.... Shakespeare's poetry is not an adornment for
Greene's plot, but a true medium, a means of absorbing that plot
into an organic dramatic-poetic structure; precisely the same is
true of Hitchcock's mise-en-scène in Vertigo."
But it was a later pronouncement in Wood's book that led to the reawakening of interest in Vertigo in the seventies and eighties: "Vertigo seems to me Hitchcock's masterpiece to date, and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us."
He supports this large claim by
examining the film's treatment of themes "of the most fundamental
human significance." And, like its creator, Wood spends
considerable time debating the significance and reasoning behind
the decision to include Judy's confession two-thirds of the way
through the film. "Our immediate reaction to the revelation, I
think, is extreme disappointment. This can exist on a purely
superficial level: we have come to see a mystery story and now we
know it all, so what is the use of the film's continuing? Why
should we have to watch the detective laboriously discovering
things we know already? Much popular discontent with the film can
be traced to this premature revelation, and in terms of audience
reaction it was certainly a daring move on Hitchcock's part."
Vertigo, according to Wood, ultimately represents the world as
"quicksand, unstable, constantly shifting ... into which we may
sink at any step in any direction, illusion and reality constantly
ambiguous, even interchangeable."
He concludes that
Vertigo "seems to me of all Hitchcock's
films the one nearest to perfection. Indeed, its profundity is
inseparable from the perfection of form: it is a perfect organism,
each character, each sequence, each image, illuminating every
other. Form and technique here become the perfect expression of
concerns both deep and universal. Hitchcock uses audience
involvement as an essential aspect of the film's significance.
Together with its deeply disturbing attitude to life goes a strong
feeling for the value of human relationships.... Hitchcock is
concerned with impulses that lie deeper than individual psychology,
that are inherent in the human condition.... In complexity and
subtlety, in emotional depth, in its power to disturb, in the
centrality of its concerns, Vertigo can as well as any film be
taken to represent the cinema's claims to be treated with the
respect accorded to the longer established art forms."
It was this kind of evaluation
that increased public demand for the film just as Hitchcock was
tucking it away for more than a decade. Wood's book was followed by
others, including Donald Spoto's The Art of Alfred Hitchcock
(1976), more of a layman's approach to the master's films. Spoto
agreed with Wood in his assessment of Vertigo, but by the time his
book was published, the film was gone-which only added to its
allure. The film that once had drawn audiences only slowly to
neighborhood theaters was now hoarded jealously in clandestine
prints held by fans and collectors; these prints ranged from the
good (pristine IB Technicolor 35mm or 16mm reductions) to the awful
(including black-and-white versions and primitive video
dupes).
Since the film returned to the
screen-at first as a part of a major 1984 Hitchcock rerelease
program, then in the glorious 1996 restoration-Vertigo has served
as mirror to the critical perspectives of our time: feminist,
Marxist, and deconstructivist critics regularly issue new readings
of its meaning, while others offer close readings that sketch
Hitchcock the filmmaker as Svengali, as necrophiliac, even as
confused loner.
Even the quality and place of Vertigo in the canon is still hotly debated.
There are still academics who see the film, with its narrative and
structural weaknesses and its occasional technical shortcomings, as
a failure; but the majority opinion places the film among
Hitchcock's most important, and often at the top of the list-and
maintains, moreover, that it is the key to understanding Hitchcock,
the artist and the man. Are the original creators surprised at the
renewed interest in Vertigo? Herbert Coleman is not surprised at
Hitchcock's popularity, but he is bemused by the attention lavished
on this film. For Coleman and other crew members, it was just
another Hitchcock project.
Sam Taylor is pleased that
after so many years the film has a following. "I am very proud. Not
surprised, because it does have the depth that is fairly unusual
for a picture of that sort. I watch with a great deal of pleasure
the growth of the legend of Vertigo."
Novak still sees the film as a
very personal one for herself and Hitchcock. "It was almost as if
Hitchcock was Elster, the man who was telling me to play a role ...
here's what I had to do, and wear, and it was so much of me playing
Madeleine ... but I really appreciated it. In hindsight, I think
he's one of the few directors who allowed me the most freedom as an
actress. That might seem hard to believe because he was so
restrictive about what he wanted. But even though he knew where he
wanted you to be, he didn't want to take away how you got to that
point. He wouldn't tell me what to be thinking to get to a point.
Today, I'm very proud of Vertigo because I do think it's one of the
best things I've ever done."
For Stewart it was the character's fear that still resonated with
him.
That, and Hitchcock's own personal involvement. "After several years, I saw the film again and thought it was a fine picture. I myself had known fear like that, and I'd known people paralyzed by fear. It's a very powerful thing to be almost engulfed by that kind of fear. I didn't realize when I was preparing for the role what an impact it would have, but it's an extraordinary achievement by Hitch. And I could tell it was a very personal film even while he was making it."
Hitchcock never matched the zenith of the period that ran from Rear Window through Mamie (and many would contend that that film is a disaster). His films of the late sixties, Tom Curtain and Topaz, were weak; only the last two Hitchcock films, Frenzy and Family Plot, showed anything like the special quality that marked his finest work.
By the 1970s, time had caught up with Alfred Hitchcock. He was an artist who had never planned to retire-yet, though he went through the motions of writing a new script, it was clear to everyone around him that his filmmaking days were over. His confidante, friend, and co-creator, Alma, had suffered a series of strokes. Letters he wrote during the period reveal the director in his final role: as a husband caring dutifully for an ailing wife. Given his concern for and attachment to Alma, it is doubtful that even Hitchcock himself entertained any serious notion of shooting another film after Family Plot in 1976. Planning and writing had always been Hitchcock's great pleasure-he often said that after finishing a script he dreaded having to go on and commit it to the screen, for the film was already complete and perfect in his mind. Yet he surely missed the days of total involvement in crafting challenging shots with a well-tuned crew.
After much lionizing in the final years of his life-months before his death, he was awarded a knighthood-Sir Alfred Hitchcock died at his home in Bel Air in April 1980, certainly aware that his reputation was intact with the only audience that counted: posterity.
The death of Hitchcock marks the passage from one era to another. I believe we are entering an era defined by the suspension of the visual. I don't think we'll have the strength to make cinema much longer. Jean-Luc Godard
Allusions to Vertigo, in today's culture of cinema, music, and television, pop up everywhere. Certainly many are unintentional-after all, every murder mystery features scenes of detectives following their objects of pursuit-but just as many are by way of intentional and direct homage to the film. Even before its initial release, Kim Novak and James Stewart had their lives affected by Vertigo, choosing for their next project a story that profited directly from the mysterious atmosphere Hitchcock created around them. Bell, Book and Candle comes nowhere near the sophistication of Vertigo, but its proximity to the film in release date, and its vague thematic similarities-Stewart is bewitched again by Novak-often confuse moviegoers.
Hitchcock reworked the themes and daring construction of Vertigo in his last film for Paramount, Psycho. Norman Bates, too, suffers from an obsession-his after the death of his mother though, in his case, of a far more deadly variety: Unable to accept her death (due to his own actions, just as Scottie felt that his inaction had led to Madeleine's death), he develops a psychological problem far more complex and unhealthy than Scottie's. Rather than remaking women into his mother, he keeps his dead mother preserved and kills off any woman who threatens her dubious reality.
Hitchcock's daring strokes in the construction of Psycho overshadowed the groundwork he had laid in Vertigo. Killing off the story's lead actress in the film's first half hour had its own disorienting effect on 1960 audiences. The effort to keep audiences from revealing the "surprise" (as the advertising campaign had attempted for Vertigo) was doubled.
The Psycho ad campaign was built on the premise that no one would
be seated after the film started. Hitchcock made a special film for
the distributors of Psycho, explaining the policy and why it should
be enforced. Pinkerton guards were hired for the major theaters in
New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to assist in enforcing the "no
late seating" policy. And, in the end, what had had a questionable
effect on Vertigo ticket sales was a major success with Psycho:
The film earned more than $8 million in its first release.
Psycho came at an important moment for Hitchcock. The last of his
Paramount films would also be his final unquestioned box-office
winner, and his work seemed to grow more impersonal as that of
younger filmmakers grew more personal. But Vertigo, if not in its
first release, then certainly in its 1963 rerelease, began to have
a slow and methodical influence on the very artists whose
success-whose power and freedom-Hitchcock envied.
Hitchcock stood in a unique position to these filmmakers: His films
influenced the experimental and independent filmmakers more
profoundly than the work of any other major studio director. Psycho
certainly revolutionized the horror genre and the production
process, proving to the studios that a very profitable film could
be made for under a million dollars. The studios for the most part
ignored the lesson, but the sixties saw an enormous growth in small
production companies whose sole purpose was to turn out low-budget
horror fare.
In the four decades since its initial release, the generation of
moviemakers who grew up on Hitchcock and 'Vertigo has grown into
maturity. And as a result much of the director's work finds its way
into popular films by way of allusion-through either images or
film construction that owes a debt to the Master's style. The
director himself seemed not to mind this homage, no matter how
absurd: When Vertigo turned up as the focus of Mel Brooks's 1977
Hitchcock parody, High Anxiety, Hitchcock himself wrote Brooks a
complimentary note and sent a case of expensive Bordeaux wine as a
gift.
Other than the obvious spoofery of High Anxiety, the most overt absorption of Vertigo is in Brian DePalma's 1976 Obsession. But that film is less an extension of Hitchcock's work than, quite simply, a mess. It exhibits none of the structural bravery of Hitchcock's film; worse yet, the very thing that makes Vertigo work-our uncomfortable identification with its lead character-is missing. DePalma's film never gives us the opportunity to share Cliff Robertson's feelings for his lost wife, who dies in the film's first twenty minutes; what's left is not an engaging mystery-despite its provocative Bernard Herrmann score-but a series of long scenes of pursuit without any momentum behind them. DePalma later reworked Vertigo in a tawdry enterprise that mixed it with Rear Window in a prurient blend, but Body Double, intended as an angry assault on DePalma's critics, never generated the kind of interest the director had hoped for.
There are better filmmakers whose work owes much to Vertigo. Martin
Scorsese, for all the differences between his typical subject
matter and Hitchcock's, has done far more to earn comparisons with
the director of Vertigo and Psycho. Few other filmmakers have taken
the kind of risks Scorsese has. The obsession of De Niro's taxi
driver in the film of the same name is the dark portrait of a
working-class Scottie in a world far more nightmarish than
Hitchcock ever imagined-a connection assisted by Herrmann's last,
truly great score.
Certainly Scorsese's lushly romantic 1993 film, The Age of
Innocence, owes much to Vertigo. Think of the lingering camerawork
over the flowers in the title sequence, designed by Saul and Elaine
Bass; the attention to art and the past; the passionate obsession
of the male character with a forbidden woman; the psychological
breakdown of that character under the grip of social standards.
Vertigo echoes in this film's every frame. The real value of a
great work of art is reflected less surely in the necessary evil
of imitation (think of the poor imitations of Shakespeare's plays
pulled together by competing theaters) than in how the work
influences other artists as they add their own creations to the
dialogue. Martin Scorsese is an excellent example of the artist as
synthesizer-as, for that matter, was Alfred
Hitchcock.
Hitchcock liked to portray
himself as the uninfluenced artist, but he screened movies weekly,
sometimes daily, during the months he spent between projects. Ken
Mogg, editor of the Hitchcock publication The MaeGuffin Journal,
has done brilliant work in linking Vertigo with possible
predecessors: the two versions of Le Grand Jeu (1934 and 1953);
Carrefour (1938); The Uninvited (1944); Portrait of Jennie (1948);
and even I Remember Mama (1948, costarring Barbara Bel Geddes and
set in San Francisco)-all bear signs of having made strong
impressions on Hitchcock.
Among the recent wave of
independent filmmakers (and Vertigo, despite its development at
Paramount, was almost an independent film in both conception and
execution), there are many directors who come to mind as keepers of
the flame. Gus Van Sant, the director of My Own Private Idaho and
Mala Noche, has done thought-provoking work within the obsession
genre that Hitchcock helped create. His imagery and rich colors
evoke the sensuality of colors that the restored Vertigo reveals.
Danish director Lars von Trier's Zentropa is a stunning film that
appears to owe much of its imagery to Vertigo. Von Trier uses
transparencies in a stylish and imaginative way, and the film's
spiraling images lead the viewer into the fractured world of
postwar Germany in much the way they led Vertigo's audience into
Scottie Ferguson's twisted inner world.
And Vertigo's influence has
extended in other directions besides the thematic. Often called
"the filmmaker's film," over the years it has had a special
influence on experimental filmmakers. Director Chris Marker was
certainly affected by the film: His groundbreaking La Jetee (1964)
is suffused with direct allusion. The twenty-nine-minute film tells
the story through still photographs of a man who's obsessed by an
image from his youth. When he meets the woman central to the image,
they visit a Parisian garden. "They stop by a tree trunk with
historic dates," the narrator tells the viewer. Then, "as if in a
dream, he points beyond the tree and hears himself saying: That is
where I came from ....” Vertigo was also an explicit part of
Marker's film Sans Soleil (1982). Sans Soleil has a complicated
narrative that moves all over the world, but a memorable sequence
intercuts scenes from Vertigo with a visit to San
Francisco.
Chris Marker recently wrote an
interesting homage to Vertigo for Projections: "The power of this
once ignored film has become commonplace," Marker wrote. "'You're
my second chance!' cries Scottie as he drags Judy up the stairs of
the tower. No one now wants to interpret these words in their
superficial sense, meaning his vertigo has been conquered. It's
about reliving a moment lost in the past, about bringing it back to
life only to lose it again. One does not resurrect the dead; one
doesn't look back at Eurydice. Scottie experiences the greatest joy
a man can imagine, a second life, in exchange for the greatest
tragedy, a second death."
Marker described his first
experience with Hitchcock's film; "I saw Vertigo as it was shown in
France. I could hardly tell the year, but the rule in those times
was approximately one year after the US release, so we can say
1958/60. The impact was immediate and didn't cease, even though I
deepened my understanding at each new screening. But the emotion
was and still is intact. When they presented part of the trailer on
TV to announce the 1996 release of the 70mm version, seeing Novak
in the green light of the room after her final transformation gave
me the same goose flesh as ever."
There is "something of Vertigo"
in a CD-ROM Marker is currently creating, entitled Immemory. "I use
as the gatekeepers of the Memory sequence the two gentlemen who
[made] the best use of the name "Madeleine," Mr. Alfred Hitchcock
and Mr. Marcel Proust. It is through a digitized Novak the user
will gain access to different layers of my Memory
machine."
Vertigo has also inspired
artists outside of the medium. Much of this work was recently
recognized in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Los Angeles. "Art and Film Since 1945; Hall of Mirrors" called
attention to artwork connected to many of Hitchcock's films, most
notably Spellbound, Rear Window, Psycho, and Vertigo. The exhibit
included both art used in Vertigo and art inspired by the film;
featured in the exhibit are the opening titles by Saul Bass and
John Whitney, Marker's La Jetee, and other works that pay homage to
Hitchcock's vision.
Cindy Bernard's photographic
work is perhaps the most straightforward in the exhibit, yet
startling on its own terms. In the series entitled Ask the Dust,
Bernard revisited a group of famous film locations to shoot
pictures using the same lenses and camera positions as the
original films. The results are haunting-the locations are
recaptured not as we know them, but like ghost landscapes, without
actors or the context of a theater to animate them. Of the
twenty-one films that Bernard selected, two were Hitchcock's: North
by Northwest (for which she chose the site of the famous
crop-duster scene) and vertigo, for which she selected the view of
the Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Point. "As an object or film,"
Bernard has said, "vertigo is beautiful, an amazing piece, just on
that level."
When she originally conceived
the project in 1987, Bernard chose as her cultural window the
twenty years between 1954's Brown v. Board of Education decision
and Richard Nixon's 1974 resignation. "The films that I included
either fit the idea-that of landscape and the effect that film has
had in defining the landscape for us-[or were] films that I loved
and wanted to include."
Vertigo fell neatly into both
categories, although Bernard admitted that the fit didn't appear
natural at first. But nevertheless, she was drawn to the film: "I
think it was the depiction of impossible memory-Scottie's inability
to let go, [his desire] to re-create the space of that experience,
to create a simulacra of Madeleine. This was very powerful to me.
I also think the attraction has to do with the film as a metaphor
of the artistic process: Scottie's obsessive desire to make this
thing/woman what it is he wants her to be."
Bernard's work demonstrates the
power of location to evoke the memory of a film-perhaps most
provocatively with vertigo, a film itself concerned with the power
of memory, and a film so linked to its location that it has
inspired decades of pilgrimage.
Indeed, it's difficult to think
of another film that has inspired this kind of devotion. Harrison
Engle, the director of Obsessed with Vertigo, AMC's
excellent documentary on the making and restoration of the film,
may have been one of the first pilgrims to visit the Bay Area
specifically to observe the locations from the film. The young
Midwesterner was on a school trip to the West Coast in June of
1958-no more than a few weeks after Vertigo's
release-when he went on his own to visit the San Francisco sites.
"The film was mesmerizing and deeply affecting the moment I saw
it," he says. "It touched that part in me that we all feel-that
wants us to hold on to the past."
Chris Marker recalled his own
visits to the locations: "My first move was to do something
relatively original at the time, very common today: revisiting all
the locations, doing the 'Vertigo tour.' I did it again a few
times, and especially in 1982 to shoot the footage for Sans Soleil.
You won't be surprised to hear that when I relaxed at the little
coffee shop on the San Juan Bautista plaza, the cookie on my plate
was in the shape of a spiral," Marker remembered. He went on to
note that "utopia" for him meant renting the apartment at 900
Lombard Street, which he did during his 1982
stay.
Over the years a number of
articles have been published describing Vertigo tours; in fact, a
map was recently published, listing the film's locations (among
other Bay Area film locations). This author's own pilgrimage in
1986 was overwhelming in its effect: The work of Cindy Bernard may
come closer to conveying the power those locations hold than words
can.
Remembered lines and music were
an important part of Christian Marclay's contribution to the MoCA
exhibition. Using elements from Vertigo's dialogue and score,
Marclay's installation, Vertigo (soundtrack for an exhibition),
plays snippets from the film at random lengths and at random
intervals. The installation was described as a "new soundtrack"
that "startles the unaware gallery visitor, conjures up iconic
images from the film, but then creates from them a new film of the
imagination."
Marclay, a sculptor and "sonic"
artist, originally composed the installation for a 1990 Paris
exhibition entitled ''Vertigo''-an exhibition that had nothing
explicitly to do with the film, though Marclay points out that this
particular curator had a penchant for using Hitchcock films as
titles for his exhibitions. "This installation was not meant to be
ambient music," Marclay explained. "The volume is meant to be loud
so that the museum or gallery visitor is startled and not allowed
to ignore it. I took the film's soundtrack as raw material to work
with-both the dialogue and the music. Once the dialogue or the
music is pulled out of context, the abstract lines take on a
significance that I didn't notice in the film.
"There are many moments in the film though where image and sound
cannot be separated, where the two have become so connected in
almost a cliché way that the music summons the image and the image
summons the music.”
Vertigo's unique appeal continues to draw artists and audiences back into the darkness of the theater to experience the wrenching obsession and loss that it conveys so deeply. Who would have ever imagined in 1958 that such a dark, unlikely story would have so much to say to audiences forty years later? No surprise, then, the comparisons between Hitchcock and Shakespeare-two masters skilled at selling such misery to a willing audience.