Hitchcock Ahead of His Time

Rating: 9/10 (6 July 2017)

John Ferguson, a San Francisco police detective, has been forced to take early retirement because he has developed vertigo following an incident in which a colleague was killed falling from a roof. He is hired by an old college friend, Gavin Elster, to follow Gavin's much younger wife Madeleine, who he believes is in danger. According to Elster, Madeleine may have become possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes, a society beauty who committed suicide at the age of 26 when she was abandoned by her lover. Madeleine herself is now 26, and Elster fears that she may meet the same fate.
Madeleine certainly appears to be obsessed by Carlotta. Ferguson follows her to the mission church where her great-grandmother is buried and to the Legion of Honor art museum where Carlotta's portrait hangs on the wall. Elster's fear that Madeleine may be suicidal seems to be borne out when she casts herself into San Francisco bay; fortunately Ferguson is on hand to rescue her. The two become acquainted and start to meet one another, eventually falling in love. Madeleine's mental health, however, does not improve, and she eventually kills herself by jumping from a church tower. Ferguson is unable to save her on this occasion because his vertigo has prevented him from following her up the tower. I won't detail the plot any further, because from this point onward it depends upon an ingenious twist which I don't want to give away. Suffice it to say that, as normal with Alfred Hitchcock, there is a rational rather than a supernatural explanation for everything we see.
Although "Vertigo" was a modest box-office success when first released in 1958, the critical reception was unenthusiastic. Since then, however, its reputation has grown, and today it is often cited as one of Hitchcock's best films. Indeed, it is regularly listed among the best films ever, and in 2012 the British Film Institute even voted it the single best film of all time, just ahead of "Citizen Kane". I think that this growth in enthusiasm is due to the fact that Hitchcock was ahead of his time, in terms of both technique and content. Technically, it was one of the first films to use a distorted perspective to disorientate the viewer and accentuate Ferguson's sense of vertigo. This effect is heightened by numerous shots of vehicles going down (but not up) San Francisco's numerous steep hills, by Hitchcock's use of the dolly zoom (which was to become known as the "Vertigo effect" and by an eerie musical score from Hitch's favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann.
Earlier Hitchcock films had normally had a fairly conventional moral structure and a happy ending with the villain dead or in police custody and the hero free to marry the lovely and virtuous blonde heroine. "Vertigo" is far more complex in this respect. The ending is a downbeat one and the principal villain is never seen to pay for his crime, something which caused Hitchcock some trouble with the censor. James Stewart, at one time Hollywood's Mr Nice Guy, plays an obsessive, emotionally conflicted character, something he had already done in the series of Westerns he made with Anthony Mann, such as "The Naked Spur". This was the last of the four films which Stewart made with Hitchcock and, in my view, by far the best. (He was not at his best in "Rope", and both "Rear Window" and the remade "The Man Who Knew Too Much" have always struck me as overrated).
Kim Novak is as lovely as any Hitchcock heroine, and even blonder than most, but her character is morally ambiguous and certainly cannot be seen as virtuous. It is said that Hitchcock was not happy with her performance, possibly because she was a last-minute stand-in for his preferred choice Vera Miles, who had to withdraw when she became pregnant, and he never used her again. I have never understood what his problem was, as Novak makes Madeleine not only beautiful but also suitably elegant and enigmatic, a woman capable of love and yet tormented by some dreadful secret. Some have suggested that Novak was too young to be convincing as the love-interest of the fifty-year-old Stewart, but older man/younger woman romances were commonplace in films from the fifties, and one more would not have seemed strange at the time. There is a good supporting performance from Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge Wood, Ferguson's ex-fiancée with whom he shares a curious, now-platonic, relationship, although she is clearly still hoping for something more.
The Hitchcock film with which "Vertigo" has most in common is probably "Marnie", with which it shares the theme of a beautiful but emotionally troubled young woman. The two films also have similar colour palettes, dominated by greens and reds. These colours do not have the symbolic significance here that they do in "Marnie", but it is quite possible that Hitchcock intended a deliberate contrast between the attractive photography of San Francisco, America's most photogenic city, and the sinister events of the plot. "Vertigo" would have been a very different film had it been shot in black-and-white.
The years 1958-1960 can be seen as Hitchcock's anni mirabiles, the period in which he produced three masterpieces in as many years, "Vertigo", "North by North-West" and "Psycho"; he was never, in my view, to work quite at this level again, although "Marnie" comes close. The three films are very different from one another. "North by North-West" is (along with "The 39 Steps") Hitchcock's best-ever treatment of his familiar "innocent-man-caught-up-in-criminal-conspiracy" theme. "Psycho" is his most probing analysis of the psychology of the criminal mind. And "Vertigo" is something unique in his work, a strange, enigmatic and disturbing mystery. 9/10