This Day in Film History (Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ Acclaimed as Masterpiece Upon Re-Release)

Oct. 28, 1983—A quarter century after it underperformed at the box office and three years after the death of Alfred Hitchcock, the director’s moody psychological thriller Vertigo went back out in limited release in the U.S., giving film fans and critics a chance to reevaluate and better appreciate a work that Time Magazine had infamously termed "another Hitchcock-and-bull story."

Vertigo was one of five “missing Hitchcocks” withdrawn by the director from circulation for more than a decade. 

A London Times article in November 1983 offered several reasons for its disappearing act, including that Hitchcock increased the films’ value through their relative scarcity; that his hard-nosed agent had demanded steep prices for their re-release; and that the director and Paramount had faced lawsuits over the years that, in one case, complicated matters further.

Rear Window, re-released a short time before Vertigo’s, at the 1983 New York Film Festival, had been an unexpected financial success, perhaps benefiting in part from nostalgia over the death the year before of its beloved, glamorous co-star, Grace Kelly. Rope (1948) and The Trouble With Harry (1955) represented offbeat departures from Hitchcock’s higher-budget, studio fare. The fifth movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), was a color, big-budget remake of a project Hitchcock first handled before his move to the U.S.

But Vertigo may have benefited the most from the re-release. 

It had only broken even back in 1958, but over the next decade had become something of a cult classic, courtesy of French critics and American film school students about to make waves in the U.S. motion picture industry (perhaps most notably Brian DePalma, whose 1976 Obsession was—take your pick—an homage or a shameless imitation of “The Master of Suspense.”)

In a blog post from earlier this year commemorating the film’s 65^th anniversary, I mentioned that Hitchcock attributed the movie’s disappointing box-office returns to the aging appearance of the 50-year-old James Stewart, who was not an age-appropriate co-star for the 25-year-old Kim Novak.

But it’s doubtful that even a more youthful-looking Cary Grant (whom Hitch would soon cast in the considerably more successful North by Northwest) could have made the story of the acrophobic detective Scottie Ferguson and the “haunted” Madeleine Elster credible. 

So little of this film is realistic at all, including several plot developments. The audience had seen like if anything remotely like this before, including its implied necrophilia and downbeat ending.

Twenty-five years later, American filmgoers had seen far more surreal matter onscreen, as well as far more potentially risqué subject matter. 

Oddy enough, some Hitchcock fans would have been better prepared because of the publication of Donald Spoto’s biography of the director earlier that year, The Dark Side of Genius, to detect a case of art preceding life: in both instances, a lonely middle-aged man (Stewart in Vertigo, Hitchcock offscreen in the making of Marnie)  becoming dangerously obsessed with a cool blonde (on film, Novak; offscreen, Tippi Hedren fending Hitchcock in Marnie).

For a decade, Vertigo even managed to upstage Citizen Kane as #1 on the film magazine Sight and Sound’s list of the greatest films of all time. For ordinary film fans like me, long after its initial mystification has faded, it bears re-watching continually to see and ponder how Hitchcock continued to disturb us all the way to its astonishing conclusion.

Quote of the Day (Harold Ramis, on the Original Dream Cast of ‘Animal House')

“The cast we had picked was Chevy Chase as Otter, Bill Murray as Boone, Brian Doyle-Murray as Hoover, [Dan] Aykroyd as D-Day, and [John] Belushi, of course, was Bluto. None of them wanted to do it except for Belushi. They were very competitive. Chevy thought he was onto a big movie career, and he wasn’t going to share the limelight with Belushi.”—American actor-screenwriter-director Harold Ramis (1944-2014), quoted in Chris Nashawaty, “Building ‘Animal House,'” Entertainment Weekly, Oct. 9, 1998

Take a look at the guys in the above picture. Now, imagine them replaced by the prominent names mentioned by Ramis. Quite a difference, eh?

By “we” in the above quote, Ramis had in mind himself, his co-writer Chris Miller, and co-producers Ivan Reitman and Matty Simmons. John Landis, brought in to direct, had his own ideas—and sounds like he rubbed the original creative team the wrong way by calling the project “my movie.”

In general, Landis desired to cast straight dramatic actors—quite a contrast from those mentioned above. But some of his other choices were, shall we say, unusual. He sounded out Jack Webb to play Dean Wormer and Meat Loaf for Bluto, in case Belushi wouldn’t or couldn’t take on the role.

But, for my money, his most unusual idea was Kim Novak as Mrs. Wormer. She had, by this time, fled Hollywood without completely abandoning her film career.

But the hard-drinking, libidinous dean’s wife would have been quite a change from the far more restrained roles that the blond Fifties goddess played in films like Bell, Book and Candle, Pal Joey and Picnic.

What might have happened if she decided to go through with it? Might other roles have come her way? Would she have played the wild cucumber scene with the same uninhibited delight that Verna Bloom did, or would she have tantalized Otter by staying just out of reach, aisle after aisle in the supermarket, as she did with Jimmy Stewart early in Vertigo?

We’ll never know. But it’s as startling an alternative casting idea as the original choice for Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate: Novak's fellow blond Fifties star Doris Day.

This Day in Film History (Richard Quine, Director of Frothy ‘50s Comedies, Born)

Nov. 12, 1920— Richard Quine, a young B-movie actor who transitioned to a director who collaborated on bubbly ’50s comedies with such stars as Jack Lemmon, Kim Novak, James Stewart, Judy Holliday, and Mickey Rooney, was born in Detroit, Mich.

Under contract for more than a decade to Columbia Pictures, Quine never became a critical favorite the way that fellow directors Billy Wilder and friend Blake Edwards did, perhaps because he wrote comparatively fewer screenplays and exhibited less open cynicism.

But he was adept at getting the maximum number of laughs from material that would have been inert in other hands, and he was trusted enough to guide the early careers of stars like Lemmon and Novak.

The collaboration with Jack Lemmon was crucial in establishing his career and the actor’s. Having started in vaudeville as a child and even singing on the radio for a time, Quine had become a contract player with MGM during WWII, only to tire of the subpar material he was handed. (One of the few good professional products of that employment was his friendship with Mickey Rooney, with whom he would make several friends and the one-season sitcom The Mickey Rooney Show in the mid-1950s.)

But at Columbia, Quine directed Lemmon in his first screen test, and would go on to make six full-length features with the actor, including My Sister Eileen, Operation Mad Ball, Bell, Book and Candle, It Happened to Jane, The Notorious Landlady and How to Murder Your Wife.

Though many cinephiles cite My Sister Eileen as an underrated example of 1950s musical comedy, it was probably Bell, Book and Candle, a romance between a witch and a publisher, that represented him at his peak.

Not only was the experience of working with Lemmon (in a secondary but amusing role) agreeable, but Quine delighted in how Ernie Kovacs could take one of his suggestions and run with it; effectively used cinematographer James Wong Howe to capture the Greenwich Village setting at its enchanting Christmastime best; and directed Stewart in what became the actor’s last role as a romantic leading man.

This 1958 adaptation of John Van Druten’s Broadway comedy was a box-office hit that helped inspire the 1960s sitcom Bewitched. Bell, Book and Candle remains one of the few films to show up regularly in the run-up to both Halloween and Christmas.

That movie was also a product of the long-running project he had been given by Columbia head Harry Cohn: guiding the career of Kim Novak, successor to Rita Hayworth as the studio's designated goddess, a blonde possessed of both stunning allure and ambivalence about the studio's control of her image and roles. In time, the professional association between actor and director turned personal as well, with the two becoming engaged during production of their third film, Strangers When We Meet.

That relationship ended, as most of his did with Quine, who during his life would be married four times and date numerous other actresses, including Holliday and Natalie Wood.

The remaining movie that Quine made with Novak, The Notorious Landlady (1962), was a suspense comedy with an original screenplay written by Blake Edwards that was turned over for radical surgery to Larry Gelbart. 

For a Hollywood used to disasters like Heaven’s Gate, it could not be termed a “troubled production,” but—with a narrative arc that resisted detection—it can safely be called “problematic.” The best guide to it was Gelbart, in his 1998 autobiography, Laughing Matters:

“Quine was in a bind. He needed new pages, lots of them, and he needed them before yesterday. His actors were assembled and he needed to start shooting right away.”

The future developer of the TV adaptation of M*A*S*H, still a relative neophyte to the movies, was assured that what he submitted was fine, and got to meet along the way a youthful hero, Broadway playwright S.N. Behrman. Then came the usual Tinseltown story, “the everyday run-of-the-mill betrayal”:

“One day, working on the last few scenes of the script, I heard gales of laughter coming from the office next to mine, the office of the producer of the picture, Fred Kohlmar. Putting a drinking glass to our common wall, a primitive but time-tested way of eavesdropping, I soon realized that the laughers were Kohlmar and Richard Quine. There was a third laugher in the room. It was S.N. Behrman. What the three men were enjoying so heartily was Behrman’s rewrite of a portion of my rewrite — the one they kept telling me was going so well. Without informing me, Behrman had been working behind me, improving my improvements, with Quine billing and cooing in his ear.”

The outcome of this—pardon the word, MASHup—was, depending on the viewer, idiosyncratic or eccentric. Or, as Lemmon later recalled: “I delivered lines with absolute conviction, and I haven't the faintest idea what they meant."

The lame results didn’t undercut Lemmon’s friendship with his mentor, who (along with Wilder) would shortly serve as best man at the actor’s wedding to Felicia Farr and who would guide him in another black comedy, How to Murder Your Wife.

But Hollywood as a whole would not sustain similar loyalty, particularly as it observed the tepid box-office outcome of Quine’s attempt to follow the example of Wilder and Edwards in expanding into more dramatic territory in films like Synanon (1965), Hotel (1967), and The Moonshine War (1970).

Quine’s initial turn toward TV—persuading the reclusive former movie star Jean Arthur to come out of retirement in 1966 for a sitcom in which he served as executive producer—flamed out after one season. He worked fitfully but more assiduously (and, perhaps, more effectively) in that medium in the 1970s, including three interesting episodes of Peter Falk’s detective series Columbo.

But Quine was becoming increasingly frustrated, even quietly desperate. His last project, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980), turned into a nightmare of creative differences and then firing by the film’s mad star, Peter Sellers.

Quine's suicide by gunshot in Los Angeles nine years later resulted, depending on who one talked to, from either failing health or deepening regret that the kind of movies he used to make were no longer given the green light in Hollywood.

(For a perceptive appreciation of Quine's career, I urge you also to read Joe Baltake's April 2018 post on the film blog, "The Passionate Moviegoer.") 

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on Kim Novak)

“I am so sick and tired of [film critic] Stanley Kauffmann knocking Kim Novak. She is a terrific-looking woman. Motion pictures are not, as Mr. Kauffmann seems to believe, transmogrified novels or' adjusted plays; these two art-forms have as little to do with motion pictures as they do with each other. Motion pictures are giant projections of religious imagery. To criticize Miss Novak because her tone of voice is always the same is as absurd as criticizing a Byzantine- ikon because it is static and badly drawn. If it were plastic and fluent, how could we give it our devotion? The actors and actresses which we movie-goers require are precisely those who, whether disguised as a sheik, a cowboy, an empress, a kooch-dancer, or what have you, remain triumphantly themselves. A large part of our aesthetic pleasure springs from the incongruity of, say, Kim Novak pretending to be somebody she is not.”— John Updike, letter to the editor, The New Republic, July 25, 1960, republished in the magazine’s May 27, 2013 issue

As soon as I saw this quote last year, I clipped it out. I had no intention of using it immediately, but I thought it might come in handy at some point—perhaps in writing about a movie made by Kim Novak, or, more likely, something related to John Updike. I’m not sure if this letter was ever used in one of his nonfiction collections, but it shows that the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist had a different hobby than what longtime readers might call to mind (golf, art). It also demonstrates his preoccupation with beauty and desire even to his dying day, in 2009.

Updike—evidently as besotted by Novak as J.D. Salinger was by Joan Caulfield—for all the silly invocations of religious iconography and “aesthetic pleasure,” is upholding Ralph Waldo Emerson's notion that “beauty is its own excuse for being.” It amused me that he would rush to the defense of the blond goddess of the Fifties and Sixties. But now, oddly enough, a half century later, I feel similarly moved, for different reasons.

The occasion, of course, was Ms. Novak’s appearance at the Academy Awards on Monday night.

Within minutes, it seemed, the social media were rife with comments about how she looked—with Donald Trump, of all people, tweeting that she should sue her plastic surgeon. What was lost on very few was the unhappy coincidence of Ms. Novak co-presenting (with Matthew McConnaughey) an award for an animated movie that turned out to be Frozen when she herself appeared unable to say or do anything. The general tenor of the comments was, “What happened to her?”

What struck me was not the change in appearance but her confusion and disorientation. My mind flashed back to two other Academy Award winners: octogenarian Mary Pickford, looking frail and even incoherent when presented a honorary Oscar in her Beverly Hills home in 1976, and Deborah Kerr, appearing fragile when accepting her own honorary Oscar in 1994. (Understandably so: that year, we learned later, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.)

The one thing I could make out that Ms. Novak said was how happy she was to be back in Hollywood. But all that statement did was remind me of why the star of Vertigo, Bell, Book and Candle and Picnic stayed away so long in the first place.

For years, the actress would simply say that she abandoned Hollywood in the mid-Sixties—still in her early 30s, still at the height of her fame—because she did not want to end up like Marilyn Monroe. Then, a couple of years ago, she acknowledged that she has been afflicted with bipolar disorder.

Those criticizing the actress, then, might want to ask how they would look and what they would consequently do, at age 81, if they suffered such a disabling disease…if they had also experienced nerve damage from an equestrian accident eight years ago (as Gabrielle Levy of the Los Angeles Times noted in her blog post)…and if they had survived breast cancer in 2010. On top of all that, as the blogger “Self-Styled Siren” reminds us in an exceptionally persuasive defense, imagine if you were still suffering from insecurity bred by a studio boss (Columbia's famously abusive Harry Cohn), hostile critics, and relentless paparazzi in the early days of fame. Now remember: your major asset as an actress is your looks. Wouldn’t you have plastic surgery? (For the manifest unfairness of this whole wild critical overrreaction, see Slate's Amanda Hess, "It’s Horrible to Be an Old Woman in Hollywood, Kim Novak Edition.")

When she disclosed her battle with bipolar disorder, Ms. Novak said she sometimes regretted leaving Hollywood so soon. After the reaction sparked on Sunday night, I don’t think this sensitive woman will ever feel that way again. 

The ones with regrets, though, should be those of us in the audience who want to place stars in a state of suspended animation forever. Some familiarity with the elderly in our own lives forces us to realize that they all look “great for their age”—until suddenly, irrevocably, inevitably, the day that they no longer do. Do we really expect entertainers to be exempt from the same inexorable laws of biology?

If we continue to insist on artificially preserved stars, we will be treated to spectacles far more grotesque than what we think we saw on Sunday. I’m thinking of something along the lines of “Fedora,” the novella from Thomas Tryon’s bestselling story collection from the Seventies, Crowned Heads, later adapted to film by one of Novak’s own directors, Billy Wilder, in 1979. 

In it, a reclusive actress long gone from the screen, reminiscent of Garbo and Dietrich, is approached by a producer who hopes to lure this still-impressive beauty out of retirement. Fedora, of course, is nothing like what she seems. The subterfuges to which she resorts-- shades, gloves, veils, bandages, wide-brimmed hats, head scarfs, even an exchanged identity—might be astonishing, but surely nowhere near as grotesque as what an image-obsessed culture reduces objects of veneration not allowed to age in public.