Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) was not viewed as an instant classic upon its initial release. While there were some rave reviews like Bosley Crowther's May 29th, 1958 review for The New York Times ("[the film's] secret is so clever, even though it is devilishly far-fetched"), Variety's May 14th, 1958 review claimed that "even the mastery is not enough to overcome one major fault, for the plain fact is that the film's first half is too slow and too long." The marketing for the film (which was inspired by French crime novelist Boileau-Narcejac's 1954 novel D'entre les morts (The Living and the Dead)) emphasized the nightmarishly bright colors as seen in Scottie (played by James Stewart)'s nightmare sequence. It was incredibly vague when conveying information about the plot other than providing a foreshadowing of the movie's themes of obsession driving one over the edge as depicted by the silhouettes of a man and a woman struggling with each other at the center of a spiraling whirlpool shape. However, the theme was spoiled by the film's trailer by billing Kim Novak as "Playing Two Amazing Roles", which revealed the connection between Madeleine and Judy by describing Madeleine as "the golden girl in the dark tower" and Judy as "the tawdry redhead that [Scottie] tried to remake in [Madeleine's] image," a fact supported by the following exchange used in the preview:
JUDY: If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me? SCOTTIE: Yes–yes. JUDY: All right, then, I'll do it. I don't care anymore about me.
This may have hurt the initial word-of-mouth for the film merely broke even during its theatrical run, earning about $7.3 million (around $66 million in 2020 dollars) on a $2.5 million budget (a little over $22 million today). "The number of people who had seen Vertigo weren't that many," states filmmaker Paul Schrader in the documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015) who goes on to say that Vertigo "was a kind of forbidden document, a kind of sacred document that only certain insiders had privilege to." Additionally, director Martin Scorsese elaborates that "[Vertigo] became a lost film, so to speak. I can tell you that all the filmmakers from the '70s were trying to find copies of it." However, over sixty years later and after multiple theatrical re-releases and restorations in 1983, 1996, and 2014, Vertigo has earned its place as an American classic.
A synopsis of the movie goes as follows: shortly after San Francisco police officer John "Scottie" Ferguson (Stewart) retires from the force due to a vertigo-inducing incident, he is approached by Gavin Elster (played by Tom Helmore), a former college colleague of his, to follow his wife Madeleine (played by Kim Novak) supposedly out of concern for her safety. Scottie pursues her through San Francisco, eventually leading him to Fort Point at the Golden Gate Bridge's base, where he rescues her after she jumps into the Bay. The two get acquainted with each other, and as they begin to fall for each other, Gavin claims to Scottie that Madeleine is unknowingly possessed by her great-grandmother Carlotta. The latter was the abandoned love child of a wealthy man and his mistress. One day, Madeleine finds herself rushing up to Mission San Juan Bautista's bell tower, and Scottie tries to catch up with her but fails due to his acrophobia. Scottie sees Madeleine throw herself off the bell tower, and her death is ruled a suicide. Mortified by this, Scottie falls into a deep depression, in which he experiences nightmares about the events leading up to Madeline's suicide before briefly ending up in a sanatorium. Upon his release, Scottie begins to see reminders of Madeleine wherever he goes, eventually meeting a woman named Judy Barton, who, despite her red hair and different makeup, reminds him of Madeleine. It is then revealed to the audience that Judy was, in fact, the woman Scottie knew as "Madeleine", and she deceived him as part of a murder plot Gavin had paid her to participate in the killing of his wife. Scottie begins to see Judy more often and grows increasingly obsessed with recreating "Madeleine" in his image by buying Judy the same clothes that "Madeleine" wore and making her dye her red hair blonde. When Judy fully transforms into "Madeleine", Scottie is overjoyed but eventually figures out Judy's identity and role in Gavin's plot as his mistress after recognizing a necklace that "Madeleine" wore. He then drives Judy up to Mission San Juan Bautista, where he confronts her about the truth and demands her to reenact her staged suicide for him. Judy pleads with Scottie for forgiveness and expresses her love for him. They embrace, but then a shadowy figure suddenly appears, and Judy steps backward in surprise and falls off the tower ledge to her death. The individual is revealed to be a nun who had heard the commotion and proceeds to ring the mission bell while a devastated Scottie stands over the edge, having lost the same woman twice.
Vertigo was marketed as "Alfred Hitchcock's Masterpiece" on the movie posters and "the story that gives new meaning to the word 'suspense'" in the trailer. However, it is apparent that the film's distributor, Paramount Pictures, chose to market Vertigo as another suspense thriller from the Master of Suspense instead of the French-inspired color noir film that it is, most likely due to Hitchcock's prior successes at Paramount with suspense films like Rear Window (1954) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) as a safe bet. French filmmakers like director François Truffaut (who would famously interview Hitchcock in 1962) dealt with moral and philosophical themes about humanity in character-centered films and revealed inner truths about ourselves. To further elaborate on the topic of color noir films, Vertigo has a mysterious femme fatale ("Madeleine"/Judy), an emotionally broken/complex protagonist (Scottie), and plenty of shots that utilize mirrors and objects in the frame to mislead or distort the audience's expectations like the black-and-white noir films of the 1940s. However, this movie was shot in and presented in Technicolor and VistaVision (Paramount's in-house widescreen variant of the 35mm film format), which gave Vertigo a distinct advantage of having both an accurate filmic representation of the movie's universe and a more extensive visual canvas on the big screen. The higher resolution and widescreen format of the VistaVision film compared to the conventional 35mm film combined with Hitchcock's second-unit cameraman Irmin Robert's groundbreaking "Vertigo effect" and the bold use of reds, yellows, greens, blues, and purples (especially during the opening credits and Scottie's nightmare sequence), enabled the film to execute its visually striking and sometimes sickly and disconcerting atmosphere to significant effect. In the 1962 interview with François Truffaut as mentioned earlier, there was mutual respect between the two filmmakers, who got along so well that they went on to experiment with each other's styles (Hitchcock made Vertigo, and Truffaut directed the 1966 film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451).
Despite Hitchcock's creative and technical genius in pulling this feat off both on and off-screen, audiences at the time may not have been emotionally ready for or entirely appreciative towards the film upon their first viewings due to its psychologically twisted and unsettling ambiance with the unusual casting of an affable leading man like James Stewart as the film's possible villain until after Psycho (1960) shocked the world with Anthony Perkins' turn as Norman Bates two years later. Also, Vertigo's initially lukewarm reception may have been due to the numerous scenes during Scottie's pursuit of "Madeleine" showcasing San Franciscan landmarks like Mission San Francisco de Asís, the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, Fort Point, and the Golden Gate Bridge, which may have tested the patience of contemporary viewers wondering what all the stylish cinematography and atmosphere was building up to, before figuring out the plot twist by the beginning of the third act, and waiting for Scottie to figure it out and catch up with the rest of the viewers' newfound knowledge. In the process, they most likely overlooked the central themes of human obsession deteriorating one's mental and emotional state as displayed by Scottie's obsession with remaking Judy into "Madeleine" against her will, resulting not only in Judy and "Madeleine's" deaths, but also that of Scottie's humanity.
While Vertigo's marketing did not do the movie many favors at the time, Hitchcock stated in his interview with Truffaut, that Vertigo was one of his favorite films, despite taking issue with some of its plot holes: "How did [Gavin] know that [Scottie] wasn't going to run up those stairs?" In 1961, the rights to Vertigo along with four of Hitchcock's films made with either Warner Bros. or Paramount (Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Trouble with Harry (1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)) reverted to him as part of a deal Hitchcock made with Paramount in 1953 (in which the rights to every film he directed would go back to him exactly eight years after their initial release), which explains why Vertigo was considered a rarity among movie buffs until its 1983 re-release, three years after Hitchcock's passing in 1980. In conclusion, despite a film's initial mixed or negative reception, that alone does not seal its fate on how future generations will view the said film. Vertigo is one of those movies for it initially went under the public's radar due to the studio not knowing precisely what kind of film they had on their hands nor how to promote it, and contemporary audiences not entirely ready for such a morally unsettling feature starring James Stewart until enough time and experience had passed for critics and audiences to finally view it as the moral and psychological critique of human obsession that it is. If judging a movie based on its initial reactions (whether they are stellar or not) is the standard for how movies are to be evaluated, then that renders not just film criticism useless, but also film history classes like the ones I am taking at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Whenever I worry about a film's critical and box office reception tanking, I often remind myself, "You never know. This may end up being the next Vertigo."
Comments