For Me, VERTIGO Keeps Getting Better Over Time

Rating: 9/10 (22 August 2010)

(No fooling -- SPOILERS galore here!) It's hard to believe now, but when I was younger, I used to have a love/hate relationship with Alfred Hitchcock's classic romantic psychological thriller VERTIGO. I loved its suspense, moving performances, haunting love story, dreamlike quality, and poignant yet powerful Bernard Herrmann score -- so why did it take me years to embrace VERTIGO as wholeheartedly as our beleaguered hero John "Scottie" Ferguson embraces his beloved Madeleine Elster? James Stewart plays Scottie, a former police detective who finds out the hard way that he has acrophobia (fear of heights, to us laypeople) when he can't save a patrolman from falling to his death during a rooftop chase. Since VERTIGO is a Hitchcock movie, what better place for our hero to live and wrestle with his phobia than San Francisco? While working on a cantilever bra invented by an engineer (nice work if you can get it!), Scottie's gal pal, designer Midge Wood (wry scene-stealer Barbara Bel Geddes) tries to help him overcome his fear gradually with stepladders ("I look up, I look down..."). Too bad the ladders happen to be next to Midge's high-rise apartment's window. Poor guy, it's always something! Scottie's old college chum Gavin Elster (suave Tom Helmore) offers him a private investigator job tailing his lovely but troubled young wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak in her finest and most challenging performance). Seems that Madeleine -- one of the coolest and most elegant of the director's legendary "Hitchcock blondes" -- thinks she's possessed by the spirit of her late great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes, and is behaving accordingly. Scottie tails Madeleine all over San Francisco to the places where the tragic Carlotta lived, loved, and went mad after her sugar daddy "threw her away" and kept their love child. Our detective finally comes face to face with his quarry after saving her when she jumps into the bay in one of her fugue states.
As the song says, the hunter is captured by the game. Soon Scottie and Madeleine are mad for each other -- but it seems poor troubled Madeleine is also mad in a less romantic way. When she confides in Scottie about her recurring morbid dreams about the Mission at San Juan Bautista, Scottie brings her there in hopes of curing her obsession. Bad move, Scottie -- Madeleine bolts to the bell tower. Scottie gives chase, but his vertigo paralyzes him halfway up the stairs (great spatial F/X here). He hears a woman screaming, sees a body fall past the window...and his beloved Madeleine is no more.
Or is she? After he recovers from a grief-induced nervous breakdown, Scottie spies shopgirl Judy Barton (the versatile Novak again). Except for her red hair and somewhat tacky fashion sense, Judy's a dead ringer for Madeleine! As their relationship grows, so does audience apprehension as Scottie obsessively tries to give Judy the ultimate makeover, recreating his lost love. (Where's the WHAT NOT TO WEAR crew when you need them? :-)) Judy's a quick study -- because she's really Madeleine! See, Judy was Elster's mistress, and he coached her to look and act like the real Madeleine Elster as part of a murder plot. 'Twas the real Mrs. Elster who died at the mission that day, and Elster's real purpose for poor Scottie was to witness the "suicide." Since Judy truly loves Scottie, has all the self-esteem of a squashed grape, and doesn't want to spill the murder plot, she's willing to play Eliza Doolittle to Scottie's macabre Henry Higgins. But the jig is up when, post-makeover, Judy wears a necklace Scottie recognizes as part of Madeleine's Carlotta Valdes collection. Furious at being played for a sucker, he takes Judy to the mission tower and forces her to confess. A black shape looms. Guilt-ridden Judy is so spooked by what turns out to be a curious nun (Judy must've gone to one of those tough parochial schools) that she loses her balance and falls...and a shattered Scottie loses his Madeleine a second, final time, looking like he wants to join her.
When I first saw VERTIGO in my college years during its 1980s re-release, I thought it was well worth seeing, but Scottie's necrophilic mania to recreate Judy as Madeleine really upset me. I found myself rooting for, angry at, and sorry for Scottie and Judy all at once. Stewart's portrayal of a man obsessed is tragic and unnerving; Hitchcock really knew how to tap into his leading man's dark side. As if the ghoulishness of Scottie's romantic obsession and the malleable Judy's heartbreaking lack of self-esteem weren't frustrating enough, even the department store salespeople and salon personnel in the film go along with Scottie's demands ("The gentleman certainly seems to know what he wants.") despite Judy's anguished protests. My husband Vinnie aptly noted that everyone on screen acted like Scottie was having a dog groomed.
On my first time around, it seemed to me that Hitchcock gave away the mystery's solution too soon, making the rest of the film anticlimactic. But my appreciation for VERTIGO grew over the years as I matured and learned more about life, people, and emotions. By the time we saw the beautifully restored version of VERTIGO at NYC's Ziegfeld Theatre in 1996, Judy's revelatory letter touched my heart and added to the suspense of waiting for the other shoe to drop for Scottie. There's no question that VERTIGO has long since become one of my favorite Hitchcock films!