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Vertigo was one of five “missing Hitchcocks” withdrawn by the director from circulation for more than a decade.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

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Vertigo,’ With a Mysterious Figure From the Past)

John “Scottie” Ferguson [played by James Stewart]: “I got a call from Gavin [Elster] today. It's funny. He sort of dropped out of sight during the war. Somebody said he went East. I guess he's back. It's a Mission number.”

Marjorie “Midge” Wood [played by Barbara Bel Geddes]: “That's Skid Row... isn't it?”

Scottie: “Could be.”

Midge: “He's probably on the bum and wants to set you for the price of a drink.”

Scottie: “Well, I'm on the bum; I'll buy him a couple of drinks and tell him my troubles.”—Vertigo, screenplay by Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, based on the French novel D'Entre Les Morts (“From Among the Dead”) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
(1958)

Sixty-five years ago today, Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Vertigo premiered in San Francisco. The director blamed its failure at the time on the aging appearance of star James Stewart—and, indeed, it did mark the transition of this leading man from romantic figure to more of a character actor.

But even before Hitchcock died in 1980—even when, its rights having reverted to him, he had withdrawn it from circulation—Vertigo was increasingly recognized as among the director’s best. By 1999, it had been recognized by the Library of Congress as being worthy of preservation. In more recent years, it has been listed at or near the top of the greatest films ever made.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the movie’s disappointing reception by contemporary audiences and critics related less to Stewart’s supposed lack of credibility in the role than with its mysterious, unnerving, even perverse nature.

After all, how many moviegoers, even now, feel comfortable with a plot that hints unmistakably at necrophilia?

Scottie, as the plot proceeds, is fooled by appearances—most famously, by that of “Madeleine,” the chic, elegant beauty impersonated by the working-class Judy (played, in both cases, by Kim Novak).

But fundamentally, and fatally, he is fooled by the old college acquaintance whose reappearance in his life is indicated in the dialogue above, Gavin Elster.

Elster, when Scottie meets him at his office, appears to be a cultured shipping magnate, deeply concerned that his wife may harm herself because of her belief that she’s possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother. In reality, Elster has concocted a plot in which his mistress will act as his wife, running to a tower that he knows that Scottie cannot ascend because of the trauma-induced acrophobia that forced him off the police force.

There are really only two true statements that Elster makes to Scottie at their initial meeting. First, the real Madeleine did have an ancestor Carlotta of some local lore.

Second, Elster says he is bored by his routine and he envies the power and freedom enjoyed by original settlers of San Francisco. It is for that power and freedom that Elster wants to murder his well-to-do wife and abscond with her money.

Since Notorious a dozen years ago, Hitchcock had sought to push against and test Hollywood’s censorship office, the Production Code Administration, notably in his treatment of sexuality. But in its way, Vertigo may have represented his most direct challenge to one of its ironclad rules: that villains be punished.

In contrast—and uniquely among all the villains in Hitchcock’s many film thrillers—Elster escapes unscathed and even unrepentant.

The evil he represents is signified by the collateral damage surrounding the murder of his wife:

*Judy, his accomplice in the crime, is dumped as his girlfriend, left with minimal money—and ends up ironically reenacting the fate of Madeleine in the tower, where an enraged Scottie has dragged her when he ferrets out the truth.

*Scottie, who still has a chance to establish a life after his disability-induced retirement from the police force, is driven to obsession, madness, and destruction of the woman he has come to love; and

*Midge, the bantering friend—and once-and-possibly-future fiancée of Scottie—loses him to illusion—and is herself driven to trailing Scottie himself as he trails Madeleine.

Present in less than a half-dozen scenes, Elster decisively tilts Scottie towards permanent loss of mental balance. His role is one of the less-remarked upon, but still fascinating, aspects of this masterpiece that offers something new with each new viewing.

This Day in Film History (Birth of Hitchcock’s Music Master, Bernard Herrmann)

June 29, 1911—The premature birth of Bernard Herrmann to Russian immigrants in New York City’s Lower East Side was not unlike how he conducted his career as Hollywood’s greatest film composer: loud, insistent, immediate—an undeniable event.

In a career stretching from 1941 to his death in 1975, Herrmann composed the music for 48 movies, from Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver.

But of course, Herrmann’s most sustained work was done with Alfred Hitchcock. The association, which lasted a dozen years, coincided with the Master of Suspense’s creative zenith: nine films, including Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds. (Hitch-like, Herrmann made his own cameo appearance as what he really longed to be—an orchestra conductor—at the climax of the director’s 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.)

Of all the people with whom Hitchcock collaborated over five decades behind the camera, Herrmann might have been the most important, because he gave these thrillers a dimension that the image-conscious Briton, according to Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano, "didn't have a language for": music and sound.

Herrmann had strong opinions about when music was most appropriate, and didn’t mind arguing with Hitchcock about it. Sometimes he felt a theme was necessary instead of silence, as when he pushed for a leitmotif in Vertigo when James Stewart’s haunted detective Scottie has a shock of recognition over a woman eerily reminiscent of the woman he loved. Other times, however, the composer resisted any attempt to show off his craft if he felt it would have detracted from the action. Thus, in North by Northwest, he allows silence to prevail for much of the early part of the famous cropduster scene, allowing audienceanxiety to build over Cary Grant’s isolation in a seemingly empty field.

Amazingly, though Herrmann was nominated for his film debut as a composer, Citizen Kane (as brooding and brilliant as friend Orson Welles’ direction) and did win for his uncharacteristically sprightly work for The Devil and Daniel Webster in the same year, he did not win—and was not even nominated—for any of his movies with Hitchcock. You have to ask why, especially when those screeching violins in Psycho are as memorable as the rapid-fire shower murder images it accompanies.

The only reasons I can imagine why Herrmann was overlooked were that a) he didn’t need the recognition (he was famous not just for his movies with Hitchcock, but also for his TV work --Alfred Hitchcock Presents, of course, and The Twilight Zone); and b) he was a prickly guy who annoyed enough people that they didn’t want anything to swell his ego any larger than it was already.

Film historians have remarked on Herrmann’s affinity for Hitchcock (the composer was evidently a devout Anglophile), but the person whose temperament was closer to his was Orson Welles. Both were classic enfants terribles who made their marks in their twenties. Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz’ bon mot about his co-screenwriter/director (“There but for the grace of God, goes God”) registered strongly in the studio system.

But Herrmann might have been even worse. While Welles might have simply ignored a boss, Herrmann would tell his off. Jim Fusilli’s excellent appreciation of the composer in today’s Wall Street Journal included this line thrown at CBS’ William S. Paley, a media mogul not easily crossed: "You're assuming the public is as ignorant about music as you."

That volatility also ended his partnership with Hitchcock. The director had put up with Herrmann’s various fits over the years (including, but not limited to, his rage that he did not conduct the orchestra for his own score of Vertigo), but was less inclined toward equitability during the filming of Torn Curtain in 1966.

The subpar performance of Marnie led studio brass to put their foot down concerning use of music in Hitchcock’s films. Executives, like their brethren elsewhere in the industry, badly wanted a hit song or two that could boost profits even more than usual. Even the grim subject matter and milieu of Hitchcock’s new project--Cold War espionage and murder--didn’t put them off: Heck, hadn’t Doctor Zhivago scored with “Lara’s Theme” the year before?

Hitchcock made a point of telling Herrmann beforehand exactly what he wanted. The composer agreed, then turned in the kind of brilliant but traditional work he’d always done before. That led to a blow-up between the two men, who never worked together again--and who never had the sustained, multi-year success with others that they had with each other.

“I believe that only music that springs out of genuine personal emotion and inspiration is alive and important,” Herrmann once said. That uncompromising nature led him into exile from Hollywood for several years after the Hitchcock quarrel, but it also ensured that film fans--even those who might not associate his name with a project--would experience extraordinary sounds that memorably--but appropriately--served the story and the character.