If you've been following my date nights with Tina, you'll know that Vertigo is a film that we did indeed watch and we both very much enjoyed on one of said date nights. It's Alfred Hitchcock, rather shamefully making only his first appearance on my blog, with a directing masterpiece. It's good, but why is it so good? Let's read on.
Vertigo tells the tale of John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart), a man who was once a police detective, but retired after a colleague fell to their death during a chase and caused him to develop a terrifying fear of heights and some lovely vertigo to go with it - hence our title. He seems to be unable to conquer that fear, his ex-fiancée Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) suggests the only cure might be another severe emotional shock as the one that brought him into it in the first place.
A friend of Scottie's by the name of Gavin (Tom Helmore) hires him to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), who has been behaving very strangely. Scottie tails her for a day, in some very drawn out scenes that speak volumes to Hitchcock's ability as a director to build tension (he is called the Master of Suspense for good reason, after all). Gavin later tells Scottie that he believes his wife is becoming possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother, who had committed suicide due to problems in her own marriage.
While Scottie doesn't seem to believe that explanation, he does note she is behaving strangely... particularly when she jumps into San Francisco Bay and he has to rescue her. The two bond over the experience, becoming friends and more as a romance blossoms between the two. When Madeleine confides in him about a nightmare she's having, Scottie takes her to the Mission San Juan Bautista in the hopes of conquering her fear and perhaps his own in the process.
Madeleine, in a fit of panic, rushes up into the bell tower... and Scottie's condition keeps him from going up after her and she ends up falling to her death. Scottie spends some time in a sanitarium, though he is cleared of any wrongdoing and the death is ruled a suicide. After he gets out, however, Scottie happens upon another woman. While she dresses differently and her hair is styled differently, she does have a striking similarity to Madeleine...
Who really is Madeleine Elster? If there really is an Madeleine Elster at all?
For a movie that clocks in at just under an hour and a half, Vertigo is a film that uses every frame effectively. Every shot draws you in just a little bit more. At first, it's the tension building up to the moment where "Madeleine leaps from the bell tower. Then confusion and pain we feel from Scottie as he finds this new stranger in his life so familiar. Then... well, to be fair, James Stewart was a phenomenal actor and this film is no exception to that.
You can see Scottie's pain as he struggles with his guilt over being unable to Madeleine's death to a borderline psychotic obsession with her when dealing with this new woman - Judy Barton. He dresses her in the same clothing as Madeleine was wearing at her death and, at the climax of the film, takes her back to the Spanish mission in order to get her to confess the truth... and what a truth it is.
The circumstances surrounding Madeleine's death are not really as interesting as the event itself and the ramifications of said event - Gavin was trying to get rid of his wife and hired Judy to impersonate her to set it all up so that Scottie would report her 'suicide' - but it is the getting to that moment that is done so insanely well as well as dealing with the aftermath. When Judy Barton comes into Scottie's life, we have no idea where it's going to go and the tension just mounts up and mounts up and mounts up as Scottie slowly becomes more and more unhinged, obsessed with this image of his lost love and his grief over not having been able to save her.
If I have to give one critique, it's that we find out from Judy in the form of a monologue what the truth is... and I really wish that weren't the case. If anything, we should have found out the truth as Scottie did at the climax. However, that's only one very minor blemish on a beautiful, beautiful canvas.
Seriously, go and watch this if you haven't. If you like any other works of Hitchcock, but somehow haven't seen this one, you'll definitely like it. It's a masterclass in suspense: Hitchcock demonstrating the bomb under the table technique for all to see. In summation: Vertigo is a great movie, it's so well done and deserves so much more than I can give it in a single blog post.
Check it out!
Vertigo was produced by Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions and Paramount Pictures.
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