In 2012, Vertigo climbed to the top of the Sight and Sound Poll as the greatest movie of all time, thanks to the largest sampling of film critics ever taken. That's a climb even more impressive than Scottie Ferguson in the closing scene of the movie.
Hitch employed a great number of tricks, starting with a classic misdirection. We are led to believe he is going to follow up on the success of Rear Window, replacing Lisa with Midge in a playful apartment scene very reminiscent of what we had seen before. Jimmy Stewart is the constant between the two films. He is now "Scottie" Ferguson, a retired police detective recovering from a nasty fall he took when he couldn't quite make the jump between two buildings in the opening scene. But, unlike the invalid he played before, Scottie has pretty much recovered and is ready for action.
No sooner do we get to know Midge than Hitch introduces us to Madeleine through a long lost friend of Scottie, who is now managing a shipping company in San Francisco. Gavin Elster has an odd problem with his wife. She has this tendency to wander and he wonders if Scottie would follow her and see where she goes. Scottie quips that it sounds like his friend needs a psychologist more than a detective, but Gavin says it is important to him, so Scottie reluctantly agrees.
Scottie is immediately smitten, as Gavin told him would be the case. Novak cuts a ravishing figure in her tailor made dresses with her platinum blonde hair wound into a tight vortex of a bun that is as mesmerizing as her faraway eyes. Scottie tails her a bit too closely and a bit too longly. We get quite a tour of San Francisco in the process, culminating in the Fine Arts Museum, where we learn that Madeleine has recreated herself in the image of Carlotta Valdes, a Spanish beauty who had killed herself a hundred years before at the same age of 26.
Hitch is strangely obsessed with voyeurism. It was the central premise of Rear Window, but done in such a charming way that we didn't really mind. It was enough for Stella to tell Jeff and Lisa they shouldn't be snooping on other people until she got involved in the mystery herself. However, in Vertigo, voyeurism takes a very dark turn. This time Scottie is being used. He doesn't know it at first, letting himself be dragged all too easily into a caper that plays out a bit too much like Double Indemnity.
The big appeal of this movie appears to be that we are given the chance to psychoanalyze Hitch for once, not the other way around. The old goat loved dissecting human beings in celluloid. His movies were all about the psychology of murder, a latter day Thomas De Quincey. He even gives us feverish dreams not much unlike the European surrealists of the time, namely Luis Bunuel, but ultimately this is a movie about how Hitch sees women, and as we find out not very well.
What we get are multiple layers of misogyny. Hitch gives all the best lines to Midge, warmly played by Barbara Bel Geddes, who steals the early scenes, especially the one in which she is drawing an advertisement for an early wonder bra, explaining the cantilevering features of this strapless brassiere to Scottie. However, Scottie has no real interest in Midge beyond that as a friend he can drink with and take out from time to time. We are led to believe this was Midge's choice, who broke off an earlier engagement after three weeks, a loose reference to Rear Window where we last saw Lisa nursing Jeff, who ended up with two broken legs.
Hitch may have been a little peeved that Grace Kelly left him for a prince. Rear Window had been a huge success and Hitch wanted to do more movies with Grace but she had chosen to marry into royalty. This left Hitch to shop for other actresses. He initially wanted Vera Miles for the role of Madeleine but when she fell pregnant a friend suggested Kim Novak, so he dresses her up like a princess, exorcising the ghost of Grace Kelly.
He also undresses her, as we see in an amusing scene after Scotty had fished poor Madeleine out of the bay, which she had inexplicably jumped into. This striptease is shown by revealing her garments all carefully hung in the kitchen to dry with the camera lingering on her bare shoulders, the sheet only pulled halfway up her back as she lies in Scottie's bed. He has made a pot of coffee and is patiently waiting for her to wake up so that he can get to the bottom of this strange story.
Unfortunately, Madeleine never rises above a mannequin in this movie. Her scenes are incredibly stilted, as if she doesn't know quite what to say. Part of it comes from her living out some sort of fantasy, but we're not sure whose fantasy this is. When, she finally appears to give herself to Scottie, she goes and throws herself off a belfry.
Such a directorial decision was virtually unheard of at the time, but there's a reason for this. All is not what it seems. Scottie is crushed emotionally, having failed to save Madeleine from the fall atop the belfry of San Juan Bautista mission due to his awful case of vertigo. We are made to bear witness to a strange court scene where her death is ruled a suicide and Gavin is free to inherit her vast wealth. It was never his shipping company to begin with. He had married into it. Another jab at Grace perhaps.
Midge tries to nurse Scottie back to health with the help of Mozart but to no avail. He wants nothing more to do with her or anyone else it seems. He has been consigned to a sanitorium to recuperate from what the doctor calls a severe case of melancholy. Sadly, this is the last we see of Midge.
The movie leaps forward about one year in time. Scottie has collected himself, but is still chasing after the ghost of Madeleine. He comes across her green Rolls Royce at one point, but finds it had been bought by an old lady. Eventually, he sees a woman who looks a little too much like Madeleine and follows her to a shabby hotel, where she resides.
At this point, Hitch decides to cut to the chase. This movie has drug on far too long. The closing scenes are grossly implausible. The dialog is brusque. Stewart looks more like a sinister Ray Milland, no longer his warm affable self. He so desperately wants to rid himself of the recurring nightmare of losing Madeleine that he forces Judy to go through the terrible ordeal all over again to satisfy his troubled conscience. He is obviously not satisfied with who Judy really is, anymore than he was Midge. Too bad because Judy had gone to great pains to reveal her real identity, hoping that he would fall in love with her anew.
We get a moment where Scottie seems to have overcome these feelings for Madeleine but then Judy puts on a necklace that is exactly the same as the one Carlotta Valdes wore in the painting. Hitch even provides a flashback, as if Scottie's expression isn't enough. Rather than going out to dinner as originally planned, he drives her all the way back to San Juan Bautista to relive the scene in the belfry of the mission church. Scottie not only wants to overcome his vertigo but solve the strange mystery that has been plaguing him for over a year.
He realizes he's been duped, but since his buddy Gavin has fled the country the only person he can confront is Judy, and so up they go the rickety wood steps to the top of the belfry only for Judy to replay the scene for real when a shadowy nun appears on the landing. She literally took the fall for Gavin, as someone had to be punished for this unspeakable crime.
Hitch is content to leave the story here, letting the viewer fill in the details. You half hope that Scottie meets up with Midge again, but no such denouement. One critic saw this as a "happy ending," as it resolved the three loose parentheses of the movie: vertigo overcome, crime resolved and one of the criminals punished. Richard Brody goes onto call it "one of the great movies about movies, and about Hitchcock's own way with them."
Maybe so, but as a movie itself it is sorely lacking. It has none of the personal chemistry of Rear Window nor the sinister Gothic quality of Rebecca, which Hitch also recalls. Nor does it have all the clever plot twists of North by Northwest, which came out a year later. I would hardly call it one of Hitch's best movies, let alone the best movie of all time.
It is sumptuous to watch in all its 4K glory, released two years ago in celebration of its 60th anniversary. There are many haunting scenes, and Hitch dabbles with some engaging surrealist animation, but sadly this movie left me with a very empty feeling.
The structure was all wrong. If Midge was to have no bearing on how this movie played out, why use her to begin with? The movie could have begun with Scottie tailing Madeleine for some unknown reason culminating in her leap, then have Scottie meet Judy by chance only to slowly uncover the dastardly plot by his long lost friend Gavin. The plot rested too much on Scottie overcoming his vertigo, resulting in a convoluted story that quite frankly didn't make very much sense. I would think there were easier ways for Gavin to kill his wife.
Hitch loved these complicated plots though. We saw this previously in Strangers on a Train, and he came up with some even more frenzied plots in later films that were hit an miss. One of my personal favorites is Family Plot, his unsung final film, in which he recovered his marvelous sense of humor.
Vertigo pretty much remained under the radar for decades after it was made. It wasn't very well received at the time, and Hitch needed Psycho to bail him out financially. It existed on the fringe of his massive filmography until it was rediscovered in the 1980s after the great master's death, and slowly crept up the Sight and Sound poll until topping the list in 2012.
To each his own, I guess.
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