Vertigo (1958)

Vertigo is Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece about the lengths to which an obsession can consume a person and about the inability to maintain a stable sense of identity (for ourselves and of other people). James Stewart, a frequent Hitchcock collaborator, plays John “Scottie” Ferguson, a policeman who suffers from the title affliction so severely that he has had to retire from the force. An old college friend, Gavin Elster, asks Scottie to follow his wife, Madeleine, who has been behaving strangely; in fact, he thinks she might be possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide at the age of 26, Madeleine’s age now. Kim Novak plays Madeleine as well as her doppelganger Judy Barton, whom Scottie meets months after he witnesses Madeleine jumping to her death from the tower at Mission San Juan Bautista. Scottie slowly begins making Judy over in Madeleine’s image, buying her new clothes and having her hair dyed to match Madeleine’s blonde twist (a favorite color of Hitchcock’s for his leading ladies). She becomes his project, and he refuses to back down from his attempts to make her into the woman he loved and lost. He even takes her to places where he and Madeleine had been, and after some initial resistance, Judy becomes Madeleine in Scottie’s mind. Viewers have, of course, already learned that Judy had been hired by Elster to portray his wife so that he can kill his wife and obtain her inheritance. This revelation comes two-thirds of the way through the film rather than at the end, a brilliant Hitchcockian move that generates greater audience suspense because we must now watch to see if and/or when Scottie will realize Judy’s secret. After watching the relationship develop between Scottie and Madeleine during the first two-thirds of the film and witnessing how devastated he is after her death—even winding up in a sanitarium for a while—we feel almost as invested as Scottie in his recreation of Madeleine. Both Stewart and Novak are fascinating although he takes a rather shockingly different approach to acting even when they are in scenes together. Getting to witness a Method-trained actor (Novak) perform with someone from the classical era of Hollywood (Stewart) provides a very clear sense of contrast in these styles. The locales where the film takes place also contribute a great deal to the atmospheric thrill of the film. In fact, the city of San Francisco almost serves as another character in the film, and its locations are beautifully rendered here: Ernie’s Restaurant with its bright red flocked wallpaper, Mission Dolores and Mission San Juan Bautista (south of the city), the Palace of the Legion of Honor with its extraordinary portrait of Carlotta, the redwood forests north of the city, and the gorgeous Palace of Fine Arts. Apparently, there are tours of the various locales still available for visitors to the city, a testament to the power of a film that is almost sixty years old. The ending of Vertigo remains as unsettling and enigmatic today as it was when it was first released, and it’s interesting to recognize how much the film’s reputation has grown since its restoration and re-release a couple of decades ago.

Oscar Nominations: Best Black-and-White or Color Art Direction-Set Decoration and Best Sound