In 2012, the more pedantic wing of the film world was rocked: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic Vertigo unseated Citizen Kane at the top of Sight & Sound’s decennial poll of the greatest films of all time, a slot which Welles’ masterpiece had occupied for the previous 50 years. It was a long road for Hitch’s film, which, like so many now-annointed classics, was ambivalently received at the time of its release; legendary critic Pauline Kael dismissed it as “stupid,” while Welles himself singled it out as the worst film of the director’s filmography. What is it about this slippery little thriller that baffled critics of its time– and elevated it to the dizzying heights it occupies today?
The answer to both may lie in its notoriously difficult-to-summarize plot (at least without spoiling the big twist– if you have not seen Vertigo, I recommend you stop reading right now and purchase tickets to tonight’s 70mm screening at the Somerville Theatre). Jimmy Stewart plays former detective Scottie Ferguson, retired and stricken with the titular ailment following a traumatic mission. Scottie’s convalescence is interrupted when an old friend convinces him to ply his former trade by following his wife, Madeleine (a never-more-beguiling Kim Novak), who he says has been acting erratically. Scottie trails Madeleine through the streets of San Francisco (in a treasure trove of vintage location shots), and confirms that her behavior is indeed peculiar. She stares for hours at a painting which bears a remarkable resemblance to herself– a painting which he later learns depicts a 19th-century woman who committed suicide. When Madeleine jumps into the bay herself, Scottie rescues her, and the two begin a flirtatious relationship. Madeleine continues to be haunted by this woman from the past, however, and when she clambers up the same clocktower in which she met her end, Scottie is unable to rescue her.
By this point, we have reached the logical endpoint of the classic Hitchcockian thriller– but for the fact that we are only at the film’s halfway point. After Madeleine’s demise, we follow Scottie through a stint in a mental hospital, and it becomes clear that this is not the same plucky detective we spent the first half of the film getting to know. Upon his release, Scottie is shaken to meet Judy, a young woman who bears the spitting image of his late love. As the two begin a relationship of their own, Judy drafts a letter of confession: she is Madeleine, and the story of her obsession (and death) was all an elaborate ruse. She can’t bring herself to deliver the letter, however, and instead attempts to make things right with this very broken man.
Placing it in context, one can see why Vertigo may not have sat well with critics or audiences at the time. Hitchcock had spent his ‘50s directing a string of highly successful (and rightly revered) thrillers like The Man Who Knew Too Much and To Catch a Thief, all lush, Technicolor affairs featuring glamorous movie stars and labyrinthine (yet tidy) plots of intrigue. By the decade’s end, however, the director was starting to chafe at his own formula and, in Vertigo, essentially turned it inside out (two films later, with Psycho, he would obliterate the formula entirely). The first half of Vertigo contains all the Hitchcockian hallmarks: the witty banter, the pop-Freudian psychology, the jaw-dropping action sequences. In the second half, however, things shift. Our perspective character is no longer the indefatigable detective, but the femme fatale. Through Madeleine’s eyes, we see the real-life psychological trauma that would beset one of Hitchcock’s protagonists– and the wrenching guilt of knowing one has completely destroyed the life of a kind, decent man. Though he doesn’t know it, Scottie’s puzzle-box is solved by the end of the second act; deep down, Madeleine knows there’s no solving hers.
But everything that made Vertigo so unsatisfying to contemporaneous audiences is precisely why its profile has steadily risen in the decades since. Younger viewers who have grown up with a (grossly unfair) image of old movies as morally simplistic continuously find themselves gobsmacked by this messy, heartbreaking psychodrama. The influence of Vertigo is, of course, undeniable; it’s no accident that the late Laura Palmer’s mysterious doppelganger in Twin Peaks is named Madeleine Ferguson. And though time will tell whether it will hold its top spot when Sight and Sound announces their new list this September, it’s clear that Vertigo will continue to be as much an object of obsessive fascination as the mysterious Madeleine Elster.
Vertigo
1958
dir. Alfred Hitchcock
128 min.
Screens (on 70mm!) Thursday, 6/9, 7:15pm @ Somerville Theatre
Part of the ongoing series: 70mm & Widescreen Fest
