Falling In Love Again

Rating: 6/10 (14 July 2008)

It's a proved fact that if something is repeated enough times the susceptible person will eventually accept it as fact. Not everyone is susceptible to manipulation and so it is that I find myself at odds with two things that I have heard - and seen on the printed page - repeated for most of my life, 1) Alfred Hitchcock is a 'master' and 2)Vertigo is a classic. So far as the first statement goes I've watched enough of Hitchcock's films to judge him a reasonably competent filmmaker but certainly no more gifted than, say, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Henry Hathaway etc. On the other hand I have no problem accepting that Billy Wilder and Orson Welles are both 'masters'. I've now seen Vertigo twice over a period of five or six years and I still can't see what all the fuss is about. For one thing it's riddled with flaws. Hitchcock needs to establish that James Steward has a problem with heights so he has Stewart, a plain-clothes detective working out of Frisco, and a uniformed cop, chase a suspect across some rooftops. The suspect leaps between two buildings, the uniformed cop follows, Stewart is last and fails to gain a foothold on the adjacent roof; he slips down the mansard roof and is left clinging to a gutter that is giving under his weight; the uniform cop abandons the chase, allowing the suspect to get away, and attempts to haul Stewart up to safety but falls to his own death. Stewart is now hanging from a rapidly weakening gutter with no hand or footholds available and not a soul to help. Clearly in 30 seconds, 60 tops, he is bound to fall to his own death. Clearly we can't have this so Hitch just cuts the scene and Fades In several months later when we discover Stewart in the apartment of a friend, Barbara Bel Geddes, complete with cane and corset and now, he tells Geddes (us the viewer) retired from the police force. He's then contacted by an acquaintance he hasn't seen since college who has since married into money and is running a large family business on behalf of his wife. He interviews Stewart in his large, well-appointed office and voices his concerns about his wife's strange behaviour, asking Stewart, as a favor, to follow her. I don't know about you but I have been in the offices of several successful businessmen and in 99 per cent of cases their offices boast a picture of their wives and/or children if they are married. Not this kiddie. He tells Stewart he will be dining with his wife later that evening and suggests Stewart be in the restaurant to get a look at his wife. Detective Stewart never thinks to ascertain that it IS his wife or to see a picture or any kind of proof that the woman in the restaurant, Kim Novak, really is the guy's wife. For a society woman Novak cannot come up with one single friend and spends her days totally alone and seemingly obsessed with a long-dead relative. Stewart follows her to a hotel, sees her at the window of her room there, braces the owner, who takes him up to what is now an empty room. Again no explanation of how or where she disappeared to. Eventually Stewart falls for her, she insists on visiting a mission outside Frisco, climbs the bell tower and seemingly Brodies. Verdict: Accidental death. Some months later Stewart sees her 'double' in the street and falls in love all over again. At this point Hitchcock makes us privvy to the scam. When she led him to the bell-tower the guy who hired Stewart was waiting at the top where he threw his REAL wife off the edge. He had merely hired Novak to pose as his wife (she did something similar in Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, when she posed as the wife of Ray Walston). Here we encounter the second 'problem'. A woman goes off a bell tower and soon the place is crawling with cops so how come no one noticed a man and a woman, one the husband of the dead woman the other his supposed wife, sneaking away. If you can buy these pathetic plot points then chances are you will think this is something more than a competent meller. Me, I'm going to check out The Apartment, Ace In The Hole, Sunset Boulevard again, see how the Big Boys do it.