Vertigo (1958)

[Bill Hare]

Romantic Obsession with a Woman Who Never Existed: Vertigo (1958)
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece is loaded with psychological twists and turns destined to keep viewers spellbound up to the film’s conclusion. It is one of those rare films that, once it snares you in its grip, will not let you go.
In a shrewd casting double, “Vertigo” combines one of the screen’s most durable and likable leading men, James Stewart, opposite one of the most hauntingly beautiful up and coming female superstars of the fifties Kim Novak, the dazzling blonde from Chicago that Columbia boss Harry Cohn handpicked to become the successor to the studio’s reigning leading lady, redhead Rita Hayworth.

Fill in the Blanks

Hitchcock kept audiences entertained by making them constantly guess, frequently fooling them and leaving them begging for more of the same. One interesting technique employed in “Vertigo” is that of inviting audience members to fill in the blanks.

This technique is used at the beginning of the film. Cinematographer Robert Burks, one of Hitchcock’s regulars, provides an amazing chase sequence on top of a roof in scenic San Francisco. The superb color tones make the scene all the more magnificent as Stewart, a plain clothes San Francisco Police Department detective, is part of the chase.

After the fleeing criminal suspect leaps from one building to the next Stewart comes perilously close to toppling immediately to his death. Stewart holds on to some shingles for dear life after having failed to execute a successful leap. A uniformed officer comes to his aid. As he prepares to reach out and take Stewart’s hand, the uniformed officer plunges to his death, emitting a final desperate cry.

A close-up of Stewart’s face followed by a scene of the city far below suggests the chilling possibility of the detective following his colleague’s ultimate fate of plunging to the ground.

From there Hitchcock imposes a cut of Stewart sitting in the apartment of his old friend from his college days and briefly his fiancée, Barbara Bel Geddes, a performer who grew up on the New York stage but was equally comfortable before the cameras. To extend the opening scene’s height factor, Bel Geddes’s apartment is situated on a high floor, affording breathtaking views of the city below.

The crisp script of Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor shrewdly and quickly informs audience members with a biographical sketch of Stewart’s character, along with his longstanding friendship with Bel Geddes, including their brief engagement and his comment that she had broken it off. Stewart has a cane and states thankfully that he is due to visit his doctor and have his “corset” removed and will be able to scratch his back again. We realize that he survived his brush with death but we never learn how, a blank Hitchcock leaves for us to figure out.

Stewart laments that, while he is known as “Reliable Ferguson” he could not stop his police colleague from plunging to his death. Ultimately he was left with acrophobia, a fear of heights that induced vertigo. Bel Geddes protests that the partner’s death was not his fault and he should not blame himself. The ultimate result of the tragedy was that John “Scottie” Ferguson quit the police force.
In an act of determined resolution Stewart decides to climb a foot ladder in Bel Geddes’s living room step by step. He gains confidence initially but finally, taking a look outside the window at the sprawling city far below, Stewart collapses as Bel Geddes prevents him from falling on the carpet.
Reliable Ferguson and doing a Favor for a College Friend
The scene with Bel Geddes establishes that he has been contacted by another of his college acquaintances, this one a man with the distinguished name of Gavin Elster. Stewart explains that he had heard that he went east and that the old college gang had lost track of him.

A meeting in Elster’s palatial office reveals that his return west involved marrying into huge money, specifically a shipping empire. The reliable Scottish side of Ferguson causes him to rebel when Elster explains that an evil spirit has seemingly taken possession of his wife, a woman from nineteenth century San Francisco historical folklore named Carlotta Valdes.
After initially telling Elster that he and his wife should be visiting a “shrink” if not “a psychologist” or the “family doctor” the skeptical Scot feels sorry for his old friend. He finally reluctantly agrees to at least observe Elster’s wife once from the bar at Ernie’s Restaurant, where the shipping magnate is taking his wife prior to an opera performance.
When the retired officer with the bad case of vertigo gets one look at the dazzling Novak, cast as Madeleine Elster, as she walks past him his skeptical side vanishes and he agrees to follow her during these “episodes” her husband explains occur during the day, experiences that he insists Novak cannot remember.

Is Elster the Cinema’s Most Unique Villain?

Alfred Hitchcock is a director renowned for playing tricks and dropping what are called “roman candles” into film scenes. The thoroughly suave, definitively polite Gavin Elster, was played by British born Tom Helmore, who had previously appeared in small roles under Hitchcock during the director’s London period.
The question that emerges after evaluating his role as Gavin Elster in “Vertigo” is whether he was the most unique villain not only put on celluloid by Hitchcock, but by anyone else. His cunning machinations resulted in the deaths of his wife, by his own hand and after brilliant previous planning, along with the demise of the film’s leading lady and the total psychological destruction of the male lead.

The Copell-Taylor leads us along with assured professionalism as the pieces fit together concisely. When old school chum Stewart as retired detective Ferguson meets him in his office attention is registered on a painting showing San Francisco a century earlier.

Tom Helmore as Elster delivers a negative commentary of San Francisco in mid-twentieth century. He sees it as clearly lacking the style and overall excitement of the city a century earlier. His knowledge and interest in the earlier San Francisco invests him with the planning skills to carry out a convincing charade for the detective’s benefit as he follows and eventually falls deeply in love with a woman who was seemingly destined to kill herself at the age of 26 in the same manner of the tragic Carlotta Valdes.
Another point made in the first meeting between Elster and the retired police detective is that with the changes between the current period and yesteryear that the nostalgic ship magnate would not mind leaving San Francisco. This is a key element since ultimately he will tell Ferguson at a key moment that he is leaving the country and will probably move to Europe, and that furthermore he will probably never return.
Along with making Elster a unique villain due to his letter perfect deportment every moment that he is on screen, belying the evil plotter and killer that he actually is, Hitchcock has again succeeded in eluding censors in perhaps an even more clever manner than in “Notorious” (1946) when he found a way for Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman to be sexually provocative without having footage cut.

Until many years later screen killers were compelled to pay for their crimes. There would be no commission of crimes and waltzing off together in the sunset as Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw would do in the violent 1972 Sam Peckinpah film, “The Getaway.”

After Tom Helmore as Elster succeeds with his brilliant machinations in using both Kim Novak and James Stewart as pawns in killing his rich wife and pocketing his profits, as far as we know he pays no price for misdeeds that would fill Sherlock Holmes’s arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty with envy.
Two More fill in the Blanks Episodes

Once that Stewart begins tailing Novak, innocently following Helmore’s cunning game plan, Hitchcock inserts two more instances where audience members are asked to fill in the blanks in the manner of the earlier mentioned beginning of the film.

When Novak, following Helmore’s game plan meticulously, fakes a suicide attempt by jumping into San Francisco Bay, leading Stewart to believe that he has saved the blonde beauty’s life, he drives her to his apartment near Coit Tower.
After the episode in the water the scene shifts to the apartment. Novak is sleeping in the bedroom and her wet clothes are drying. Finally she rises and converses with Stewart for the first time. How could she have been where she was dressed as she was without Stewart removing her wet clothes, dressing her in dry bedroom apparel, and putting her to bed? We learn nothing about what happened from the moment Novak jumped into San Francisco Bay and that when the audience finds her sleeping in Stewart’s bedroom.

Another question arises. Novak leaves on her own presumably in her own car. There were two cars initially as Stewart was following and watching Novak. Stewart could not have driven both cars home, yet we learn nothing of another party being involved in any regard.

The second unexplained incident occurs when Novak parks and enters the McKittrick Hotel, where the establishment’s clerk, Ellen Corby, tells Stewart she is a regular resident. Corby insists that Novak has not been in the hotel that day, adding to the psychic dimension that Helmore has invented. The unresolved question is whether Stewart only believes he saw her enter the hotel and appear at the window of an upstairs room, or whether Corby is also in on the plot and is attempting to fool Stewart.

Romantic Obsession with a Woman Who Never Existed

[Bill Hare]

“Vertigo” was the most challenging role of Kim Novak’s career, coming when she was in her mid-twenties. The principal challenge was playing two decidedly different women, a classy, woman from the upper crust San Francisco aristocracy, blonde beauty Madeleine Elster, and the plain spoken to the point of crudity Kansan Judy Barton, a redhead who quickly reveals her street toughness and concedes that she had been “picked up before.”
Unlike the polished Madeleine Elster, Barton gives off with the manner of a woman living in the working class Empire Hotel situated next to the store where she is employed as a sales clerk, I. Magnin.

Stewart as Scotty Ferguson sees Judy Barton with a group of fellow sales clerks after they had finished their work days at I. Magnin. When he follows her to her small, plain but serviceable hotel room she initially tells Ferguson to leave, complaining “you’ve got a nerve” and at one point asking with a snarl, “Is this a pickup?”

When she later takes pity on Ferguson and his insistence that he only wants to talk to her because she reminds him of someone he knew, going from a sarcastic “I’ve heard that one before” to “You’ve got it bad” and ultimately to the conclusion of “She’s dead.”

Story Convergence and Psychological Jockeying

The ingenious two part story converges when Judy, showing compassion toward Ferguson, agrees to have dinner with him and asks for an hour to prepare. When she initially begins packing the tip-off has been made that the retired detective found the woman he had known earlier.

As the stories converge Judy finally puts away her suitcases and decides to go with the dinner plans. During the period when she planned to presumably leave the city and get far away from Ferguson and the plot and ultimate murder of the real Madeleine Elster, she was also shown writing a letter with a voice over indicating her admission that Ferguson had been duped by Elster but that the part of the plot that had been unplanned was that she would fall in love with him.

It is no surprise, given Ferguson’s past conduct, that he seeks to become involved with Judy and endeavors to make her over in the image of Madeleine Elster. Two solid reasons reveal why Judy Barton, who loves John “Scottie” Ferguson for himself, would resist the makeover:

1) Despite her insistent claim that she did not know that the sinister plot of her then lover Gavin Elster would result in the murder of his wife that was the ultimate result. Could she not be expected to resist becoming a constant reminder of a woman who never was, a role she played that resulted in Svengali Elster meticulously carrying out a murder plot resulting in the death of his wealthy wife, presumably moving to Europe with his ill-gained profits, while she was abandoned by him after serving her purpose, making her a victim as well as Ferguson?
2) As a woman who loved Scottie Ferguson without reservation, would Judy Barton want to play a role of someone who was being substituted for a woman who never lived except as a creation of Svengali Gavin Elster?

The resulting relationship between Ferguson and Barton is highlighted by psychological jockeying. When Ferguson takes her to the exclusive Rahnsohoff department store he has one object in mind, making Judy over as thoroughly as possible as the fantasy woman with whom he had fallen hopelessly in love, Madeleine Elster.

The story reaches its most heightened psychological dimension during the emotional tug of war between a Ferguson intent on reconstructing the past and a Barton equally determined to avoid it. Gradually Barton breaks down in the wake of Ferguson’s determination. She makes her last stand after an otherwise comprehensive remake by clasping some of her hair, explaining that it did not work out the way he suggested. Ferguson removes the clasp and his image of Madeleine Elster is fully restored.

Judy’s Ultimate Mistake

[Bill Hare]

Scottie Ferguson’s psychological volatility stems from the earliest part of the film when we learn that he has developed vertigo to the point where he feels compelled to resign from the San Francisco Police Department. This weakness is used by a ruthless, while always gentlemanly on the surface, Gavin Elster. The evil Elster is convinced that Ferguson with his vertigo will not be able to catch up with Barton when she runs up the steps toward the bell tower.

In addition to being crushed over Madeleine Elster’s death, believing she was someone else, Ferguson is professionally brutalized by the local coroner at the inquest into the actual woman’s demise. Henry Jones, a top character performer frequently seen in comedy roles, makes a memorable one scene appearance as he directs sarcasm at Ferguson. Jones makes his belief plain that the former police detective should have saved Madeleine Elster. At one point he states bitingly that the law has little to say about “doing nothing.”

As for Ferguson, his account was that he blacked out after the body that he felt was that of the woman who is really Judy Barton but was actually Madeleine Elster toppled to the ground. He further stated that he recalled nothing after that until recalling being in his apartment one hour later.
The official ruling is accidental death and a thoroughly crushed Ferguson appears to be elsewhere as Gavin Elster meets him for the last time. Elster laments that the coroner “had no right to talk to you like that” and tells Scottie that he expects to be leaving San Francisco soon and for good, probably moving to Europe. Portraying the good fellow to the last, Elster tells Ferguson to contact him while he is still in town if there is anything he can do for him. In reality he has done enough for several lifetimes.
Gavin Elster looms as a chivalric gentleman for all seasons who in reality is a master plotter from hell. Yet we hear nothing from the hellish Elster and only momentarily see him place a hand over Judy Barton’s mouth as she screams while the body of the real Madeleine Elster topples to the ground.
As for Judy Barton, her ultimate mistake occurs when she unwittingly tips Scottie off as to her true identity. This occurs when she wears a necklace that had been part of the elaborate costume she used to synchronize with the dress and necklace of Carlotta Valdes during a fake trance as she sits transfixed before a painting of the woman who is supposed to then possess her body and soul.

Here was Scottie Ferguson, who was barely able to shake off catatonic cobwebs and had been confined to a sanitarium in a state of depression following the inquest subsequent to Madeleine Elster’s death. This is the Scottie Ferguson who, after meeting Judy Barton, feverishly sought to make her over in the image of the presumed dead woman he desperately loved.
Once that he sees the necklace Ferguson flies into an outrage that would equal a Mount Vesuvius eruption. He forces a badly rattled Barton into his car and drives back to the place where the death culminated. Step by step he drags her against her will up to the bell tower where Elster pushed his already dead wife. Buttressing Elster’s case was a Scottie Ferguson frustrated by heights and unable to make it up the steps to the bell tower.
This time Ferguson succeeds in reaching the bell tower as man defeats vertigo. In his first scene with old friend Midge, Ferguson explains that a sudden shock could eliminate his vertigo and restore him to a normal state. As they reach the top he obtains confirmation of the plot from Judy Barton, who begs him to try again, that they can succeed in building another romance.

The camera zeroes in for a close-up of a totally frustrated Ferguson. Barton is told that it is too late, that there is no going back. At one point he tells her how much he loves her, calling her “Madeleine” in the process. This looms as the ultimate tip-off regarding his confused status.
An image beckons from the darkening shadows. It is a nun there to ring the bell to beckon the arrival of evening. A badly jolted Judy Barton is so stunned that she falls from the bell tower to her death.

As Ferguson is pictured looking downward once more, this time at the body of Barton, one must ask if he is the final murder victim of the cunning Gavin Elster. His wife was killed by his own design, while Judy Barton dies as part of a shocking chain of events that are an outgrowth of his cunning trickery.
Then there is Scottie Ferguson, a picture of abject dejection, as devoid of life as when he sat in a catatonic state in the sanitarium, unaware of his visitor Midge.
Can Ferguson bounce back and renew his life?

Given the tragic prevailing circumstances it is difficult to envision such a result. It is far easier to see John “Scottie” Ferguson as the final victim of Gavin Elster, essentially murdered by the plotting of perhaps the most cunning of all film villains.

Standing the Test of Time

Despite its current status as one of the greatest films of all time by any measuring standard, “Vertigo” in its initial release was a box office disappointment. Perhaps Hitchcock was then suffering the same fate as numerous painters and writers, for whom time was an ally as it took a while for the public to catch up with and fully appreciate the true measure of their genius.
James Stewart, a consummate professional, received nothing but positive vibes from his work with the younger and less experienced Kim Novak. He credited Novak with superb mastery of a challenging and difficult double role while also tossing a bouquet Hitchcock’s way for his luminous direction.
The always alert showman, Columbia Studios boss Harry Cohn, knew a dynamic team when he saw it. Cohn re-teamed Stewart with his bright and shining new star Kim Novak in the 1959 release “Bell Book and Candle,” an adaptation of a hit Broadway play by John Van Druten. Unlike “Vertigo,” this film was a comedy in which the always bewitching Novak played a modern day witch with Stewart her romantic interest.

In conclusion, praise must be dispensed in the direction of the masterful composer Bernard Herrmann, who in Hitchcock’s 1956 hit “The Man Who Knew Too Much” was cast as himself as he played the conductor of the symphony orchestra that played at London’s Royal Albert Hall the evening that Doris Day saved a visiting prime minister’s wife. Stewart starred as well as Day’s wife.

The haunting Herrmann theme that became all the more dominating during the intense love scenes involving Stewart and Novak along with exquisite color photography and intelligent use of San Francisco as a scenic backdrop gave “Vertigo” the look and feel of a concert set in a resplendent art gallery complemented by superb acting.

[Christina Delassalle]

What a fantastic review.

The car doesn't bother me as much as Ellen Corby.

When Madeleine leaves Scottie's apartment and drives away, I did not see Scottie's car there, so maybe he had poor Midge come get him later and get his car, or he walked back and got it after Madeleine left.

But the part where Ellen's Corby's desk clerk character says Novak's character, who she said she knew as Carlota, never came in. That does not make much sense, I can't believe Gavin Elster would have taken somebody else in on his murder plot. I have thought that perhaps Novak's character could have asked the clerk under no circumstances tell anybody she was there, but then how did Madeleine get out of the Hotel without Scottie seeing her. Yes it is a small mystery, and perhaps Hitchhock would tell us.."Don't sweat the small stuff".

So much of the movie has a dream like quality to it anyway, maybe Scottie was having hallucinations, but I don't think at that point he was.

Anway we watched it last night for the gozillionth time and it never gets old!

[David]

Thank you, Bill.

[Steve-O]

Get well Kim...


'Vertigo' Star Kim Novak Diagnosed With Breast Cancer

[Steve-O]

As many of us have already done during our treks to Noir City... here's what Stewart's place looks like today in San Fran. (after the Fiat commercial... which makes me think, "hey, I didn't know they still made Fiats!")