‘Too perfect’? Ken Mogg takes a look at Alfred Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954)

‘Lisa, it’s perfect!  As always!’ 

-      Jeff (James Stewart) in Rear Window

That Hitchcock specifically meant Lisa to be a businesswoman, in addition to being a model, is evidenced by a 1974 deposition in which he testified in court that he patterned Lisa on Anita Colby (1914-1992).

-      Elise Lemire(1)

The chain of little habits that were their lives unreeled themselves.  They were all bound in them tighter than the tightest straightjacket ever devised, though they all thought themselves free.

-      Cornell Woolrich, “It Had to be Murder”/“Rear Window”

 

 

SO WHAT’S WRONG WITH perfection?!  Very little, although it’s worth remembering that SO WHAT’S WRONG WITH perfection?!  Very little, although it’s worth remembering that Russia’s famous Bolshoi Ballet were considered so accomplished that when, one evening, one of the ballerinas momentarily mis-stepped, the whole audience cheered and applauded with delight.  Jeff in Hitchcock’s film has become a bit like that audience: spoilt and a little bit cynical.  But he is about to be taught a life-lesson. The plot of Rear Window may be traced back to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s cautionary tale, ‘Der Sandmann’ (1816)(2), the basis of the ballet Coppelia (1870) by Léo Delibes, in which the naïve youth Franz spies on a Dr Coppélius and narrowly avoids an untimely fate at his hands.  Meanwhile, Franz’s girlfriend, Swanilda, has risked her own life to placate Coppélius and smooth a path towards her marriage to Franz.

Variants on, or complements to, the original Hoffmann tale will be found in the short story “Through a Window” (1894) by H.G. Wells – another favourite author of Alfred Hitchcock – and in the official source of Rear Window, Cornell Woolrich’s own short story “It Had To Be Murder” (1942), although neither contains the rich set of sub-plots detailing the lives of Jeff’s various neighbours that were invented for the film.(3)  The neighbours were dreamt up by Hitchcock and screenwriter John Michael Hayes.  Each is given a little story of his/her own (e.g., the Composer, seen making slow progress on his composition – which, though, finally earns him love), somehow reflecting on Jeff’s relation with Lisa (Grace Kelly). 

 

Lisa (Grace Kelly), Jeff (James Stewart)

‘Impotence’ and ‘Emptiness’

Jeff’s ordeal sees him confined to his apartment for several weeks, in a wheelchair because of a broken leg in a cast which mustn’t be jarred.  Sadly, Lisa’s potentially seductive visits seem to remind him of his present ‘impotence’, although a turning-point occurs when she risks her life for his sake to gather evidence against the murderous Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) who lives in the opposite apartment, and whom Jeff quickly suspects of killing his wife.  Note: when last seen, Thorwald’s wife was herself confined to bed, and given to nagging her husband for his extra-marital affairs. Implicit in such plot-construction involving overlapping characters is something not sufficiently noted of Hitchcock’s stories: their showing our ‘common humanity’, and even how ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I’!  Hitchcock was a humanist.

In fact, he told François Truffaut that the film’s apartments show an assorted cross-section of people, and that the film ‘would have been very dull’ without it.  All of the people live around an empty courtyard, which only somehow highlights their ‘liveliness’.  Among them is the Sculptress, whose current piece of work has its own ‘emptiness’ in the middle, no doubt an allusion to the sculpture of Henry Moore (1898-1986), already internationally known by the time Rear Windowcame out.  She calls it “Hunger”.  That may be Hitchcock and Hayes’ little joke directed at those who always want an artwork to carry a literal meaning – and who, if they can’t find one, rank the work lower!  (When Truffaut obligingly asked Hitchcock what was the deepest logic of his films, he simply said: ‘To put the audience through it!’)  

The sculptress with 'Hunger'

Actually, emptiness was a device that Hitchcock used more than once.  His masterly film a few years later, North by Northwest (1959), has a literally pivotal scene at Prairie Stop – which is surrounded by a vastness that nonetheless soon spells trouble for hero Roger Thornhill.  Think, too, of the Gabriel Valley scene in Spellbound (1945), featuring a long sloping snowfield ending at a precipice which nearly proves to be the undoing of John Ballantyne and Constance Petersen when they ski down it.  Woolrich’s “It Had to Be Murder”/“Rear Window” speaks of its cast-ridden hero ‘stewing in a vacuum of total idleness’, again suggesting that his condition is one that will attract trouble!  Jeff in Hitchcock’s film picturesquely refers to ‘this swamp of boredom’.(4)

‘Pure Cinema’

From the start, Rear Window shows itself to be a model of concise exposition and ‘pure cinema’.  Its first four minutes or so, including the credits (behind which we see three window-blinds slowly rising, one after the other) tells us everything needful about the beginning of a new day in the apartment block.  First off, we see the Paramount logo with its familiar mountain surrounded by a circle of stars – Hitchcock would have been pleased with this contrast to the urban setting of the film itself.  On the soundtrack, by Franz Waxman, there’s an urgent, jazzy rhythm (all the better for not being your expected Hitchcock music perhaps).  We hear a small metallic cymbal struck several times in rapid succession, presumably by a drumstick.  However, this prelude quickly takes on board several other jazz instruments, including woodwinds.  The three rising blinds suggest the presence of a mysterious, invisible ‘force’, an effect that Hitchcock clearly liked: think, too, of the credits sequence of North by Northwest with its surreal green background and encroaching lines that intersect, accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s musical ‘growl’ (this being an MGM film …), or of Marnie (1964) which begins with a sedate-enough set of credits except for a startling musical ‘cry in the night’, again of Herrmann’s doing.  Next, slowly, the camera moves out the window to show the whole courtyard (or as much thereof as it can accommodate, short of employing a fisheye lens), then tilts down. Cut to a shot of a cat crossing one side of the courtyard; Hitchcock needed the moving cat to ‘motivate’ the cut downwards; in addition, the shot  immediately affirms that animate life will be found here (and not just passing in a distant street).  Soon we lose the cat and, with an upwards tilt, the camera begins to climb up one side of the courtyard, then back to the left.

The courtyard 

Among several notable details, we see white doves perching on a low side roof.  The camera continues to the left.  Down a narrow side alley we glimpse the street.  By now, the camera is swiveling to re-enter the apartment where we started. Next to the window is the sleeping figure of Jeff, and his face and brow are sweating heavily.  This is another of Hitchcock’s impressive details – how did they get such realistic-looking perspiration?!  It can’t have been easy.

Another cut follows logically – it shows the reason for Jeff’s sweating.  A wall-thermometer states the temperature to be 94° Fahrenheit.  The camera moves away, and we see that the angle has changed again: now we can see into the apartment adjoining Jeff’s where a man is shaving while listening to the radio.  (All these early details are suggestive of morning activities.)  A voice on the radio is asking, ‘Men, when you awake in the morning do you feel tired and rundown?’  Annoyed, the man moves to switch the station to one playing music. Hitchcock cleverly uses this moment to make a sound-cut (as well as a visual one) to a fire-escape balcony opposite, on which we can see a middle-aged man sleeping – but who, next moment, is awoken by his alarm clock ringing.  Then we see that he is not alone.  His wife raises her head, and she is sleeping alongside him, but in the opposite direction.  (Could this symbolise Hitchcock’s cynical view of marriage?!  Cf the newly-weds’ relationship later.)  

The camera continues off them and now tilts down to the window of the photogenic Miss Torso.  Barely decent, she does her limbering-up exercises as she prepares to boil some coffee.  Again the camera moves on, briefly taking in the side alley – now children are to be heard and seen playing in the street – then back inside Jeff’s window, where he is still sleeping.  (His face seems to have lost its sweat.  Continuity error, or perhaps to avoid over-emphasis?)  The camera continues on down Jeff’s sleeping form, showing it in a wheelchair (specified in the script as an Everest and Jennings), and his leg in a cast on which someone has written, ‘Here lie the bones of L.B. Jefferies’.  (A suggestion of back-story, this.  Who wrote that cheery inscription? …)  But the omniscient camera has more to show us.  It pulls back and pans left so that we see a smashed-up Speed Graphic camera (also specified in the script, with the comment, ‘the kind used by fast-action news photographers’), then up to photos on the wall (taken by Jeff, we infer), including one of a careening, up-ended racing car and a wheel hurtling towards the lens.  

Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy) 

‘And now we know everything!’

 

After offering brief glimpses of other ‘action’ photos (one of them of an atomic-bomb test – did Jeff cover that?), it moves downwards again and now we see an intact camera with its flash gun (we guess it’s the replacement camera) and, nearby, a framed negative-image of a smiling woman (very arty!).(5) Alongside it is a pile of what looks like ‘Life’ magazines.  One of them features on its cover the same woman, but the image is positive.  Fade to black.  Fade-in to Jeff, sitting up and running an electric shaver over his stubble. Reader, it’s very tempting to summarise all of the above by saying, ‘And now we know everything!’ 

Notice how much work Hitchcock asks of viewers, no doubt because he understood that this draws us inside the film. It’s something he had always practiced. When Lisa turns on a trio of lamps to introduce herself and her three names (‘Lisa … Carol … Freemont’), one might recall the insouciant Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) in The Lady Vanishes (1938) slinging his belongings in quick succession over the bedposts of Iris (Margaret Lockwood) in a Ruritanian inn lacking vacant rooms.  (Their relationship thus begins in a state of tension not dissimilar to the apparent impasse which Jeff and Lisa’s relationship has reached early in Rear Window.)  The Lisa character appears to have three ‘sources’.  The first is obviously Anita Colby.  Elise Lemire (p. 71) quotes modelling expert Michael Gross who called Colby ‘the world’s first supermodel’.  Lemire continues: ‘At the height of her modelling career, [Colby] appeared on fifteen magazine covers in one month.’  With Grace Kelly playing Lisa, Hitchcock would have known that he had a sure-fire winner!  Second, John Michael Hayes told me - and others - that he based Lisa on his wife! More than once in the script there’s an almost gratuitous remark about Lisa to the effect, ‘She is a vision of loveliness!’  

Grace Kelly

After she emerges from Jeff’s kitchen (it looks like) where she has donned the flimsy nightdress she brought with her in her Mark Cross case, the script notes breathlessly: ‘She is an ethereal beauty, in sheer pale peach night gown, covered by a gossamer matching kimono.’  (Lucky Jeff, but also lucky John Michael Hayes, I dare say!)  And third, it seems likely that Lisa is modelled, to some extent, on Ingrid Bergman, reputedly one of photographer Robert Capa’s many ‘girlfriends’ – I recall reading that Hitchcock met Capa when Bergman introduced him on the set of Spellbound (1945).  For a while, it seems that Capa had lady friends wherever his travels as a photographer took him.  Interestingly, on Jeff’s wall hangs a decorative shield that might easily be interpreted as a female genital symbol, or trophy.  Scholars have commented on it!(6)

Stewart, Kelly ('in sheer pale peach night gown') 

‘Rainbirds’ 

 

Rear Window teems with marvelous things in all departments.  The first of its marvels is the set and what it could ‘do’. Hitchcock even asked for ‘rainbirds’ to be installed above it so that when a summer shower descends in the early hours of the morning, he could control it like everything else.  The white doves that seem quite at home here turn the set into a virtual aviary.  The whole set feels lived-in.  Equally, it is full of sensuous touches (including the summer shower) such as the many reminders of the heat.  We see an iceman delivering a large block of ice for someone’s ice-box (in 1954 not everyone had refrigerators); the air itself seems to waft sounds across the courtyard, which has been stilled of undue activity by the heat. At the same time, the sounds really do seem to be arriving from a distance.(7)  A woman singer and a siffleuse – possibly the same person – can clearly be heard practising scales or giving a professional clarion-like penetration to her whistling. (Note.  The script identifies the siffleuse as the woman we had seen sleeping on the fire escape.  Even when she whistles her little dog – which meets a sad end – the sound is impressively powerful.  Hitchcock’s love of music halls and their variety acts may be felt paying off for him here and throughout.)  

Multiple radios emit frequent musical ‘punctuation’ to the film’s story, enabling clever commentary or counterpoint for dramatic moments.  Somehow the radios never seem to be turned on at the same time, though!  So there is no jarring cacophony, only pleasing ‘effects’. At least one academic article is devoted to the Rear Window soundtrack.  On the web, Roger Crane claims that he has detected 39 different songs or musical excerpts in Hitchcock’s film, many of them cleverly or wittily chosen.  Example: a song, “Lady Killer”, directly contradicts the detective Doyle (Wendell Corey) when he asserts to Jeff and Lisa that nothing untoward has happened in Lars Thorwald’s apartment.  If Lisa during the film provides us with a virtual fashion parade of her several outfits, the soundtrack constitutes a ‘hit parade’ of popular music of the 1950s. Example: the 1953 Dean Martin hit “That’s Amore”.  

Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr)

However, it isn’t Jeff and Lisa’s theme tune exactly.  Equally close to being that is, first, Nat King Cole singing “Mona Lisa” from 1950, and then, finally, the Composer’s own song on which he has being working throughout the film, called simply “Lisa” – and which with a triumphant flourish he reveals to an enthralled Miss Lonely Hearts that it’s now on disc.  (We hear the words ‘Lisa … with your starry eyes’. Cf the lyrics of “Mona Lisa”: ‘Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa/ Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?’ That certainly fits Jeff’s initial prejudice against his ‘too perfect’ Lisa!)                                                          

Jeff’s seeming prejudice against Lisa gives his nurse/masseuse Stella (Thelma Ritter) plenty of material to taunt him with. For example, we hear her ask: ‘Is what you want something you can discuss?’  (Being gay used to be considered not discussable in polite society!  Jeff reacts to Stella’s question with shock!)  Stella is the film’s comedian – and possibly its warmest character.  She is all pro-marriage, telling Jeff: ‘When I married Myles, we were both maladjusted misfits.  We are still maladjusted misfits.  And we’ve loved every minute of it.’  (Note that Hitchcock has managed to acknowledge marriage as the ‘preferable’ way to go, while accommodating the fact that there are other ways!  Working in the film industry from its silent days, he regularly found himself collaborating with gay men and women.  He is even on record as saying, ‘If I hadn’t married Alma I might have gone gay!’)

Stella (Thelma Ritter) and Jeff 

‘Hostility’

Hitchcock, then, was a master at not willingly alienating potential members of his audience.  Again Stella is important here.  John Michael Hayes was explicit to me that when a film begins – and particularly a Hitchcock film – many viewers  bring with them a certain ‘hostility’, both to each other and to Hitchcock.  They feel challenged, and instinctively reciprocate by saying in effect, ‘All right Hitch, show us.  Do your stuff!’  That’s why, at the outset, Hayes gave Stella the gag-line about diarrhoea: ‘When [a director of] General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go!’  (She claims that she was thereby able to predict the stock market crash in 1929!)  Hayes fed Hitchcock’s ‘humanism’ – his sense of ‘our common humanity’ –as expertly as any screenwriter ever did.  And few people come away from Rear Window without having succumbed to its charm.  In other words, once you find yourself hooked, you won’t easily tear yourself away.  

Hitchcock made what are totally integrated films. You feel yourself part of a special world, not unlike the everyday one except that Hitchcock’s omits the boring bits, and which has its own special logic.  Call it the logic of suspense.  For example, Hitchcock would have admired the climax of Wells’s “Through a Window” in which the ailing protagonist, surrounded by medicine bottles, uses them as weapons against his attacker.  Similarly, but even better, the ingenious Hitchcock has Jeff use one of his principal tools of trade, his flashgun, to baffle Thorwald just long enough to defeat his designs on Jeff’s life, and to summon help.  (Even then, it’s a near thing!)  An additional satisfaction: the triumph of brains over brawn … 

              

‘Virtuoso’ 

Woolrich’s determinism is surely trumped by Hitchcock’s humanism.  So is Rear Windowa profound film?  I would say ‘yes’ – provided that you don’t ask for a literary kind of profundity, one of themes and ‘deep’ characterisations.  No single character or story in Rear Window offers that, exactly.  Rather, I suggest that its profundity is of a ‘virtuoso’ kind, as much of skills and dexterity as of wise thoughts!  With plentiful Hitchcockian wit in evidence, of course, from the screenplay by the invaluable John Michael Hayes.

       

Notes

1.  Lemire’s excellent essay, “Voyeurism and the Postwar Crisis of Maculinity in Rear Window”, may be found in John Belton (ed.), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (2000).

2.  Hitchcock’s personal library contained Hoffman’s complete works - in both German and English, I think.

3.  Woolrich’s and Wells’s stories are sufficiently alike to suggest that Woolrich may have plagiarised from Wells!

4.  John Bunyan’s morality tale Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) led the way with its ‘slough of despond’ …

5.  If Robert Capa was in the filmmakers’ minds as a model for the Jeff character – see text – it should be remembered that he was both war photographer and portraitist.

6.  I think, too, of film director David Lean who reputedly had a girl in every major port, from Ireland to India and even New Zealand where he nearly made a version of Mutiny on the Bounty.                

7.  Similarly, in Psycho (1960), the voice of ‘Mother’ berating Norman comes wafting from the house up the hill and is heard by a startled Marion.  The rain that was falling when Marion first arrived has passed, and so the air is now clean and fresh, and the sound is exceptionally clear (an observant touch by Hitchcock).  Also, the fact that Rear Window takes place during a heat wave is explanation enough for why so many of the apartment dwellers have their windows open - and serves as a suitable metaphor for the tensions that surface during the film.  (Cf Ted Tatzlaff’s The Window, 1949.)

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Editor's Note: This is the ninth essay by Hitchcock scholar Ken Mogg to have been published on Film Alert 101.

The other essays can be found if you click on these links.

Under Capricorn 

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Vertigo

Vertigo's Cinema Sources

Hitchcock's Methods

I Confess

Rope 

Torn Curtain  

About the author

Ken Mogg has published widely on Hitchcock; his The Alfred Hitchcock Story(1999, revised 2008) covers every film 'in loving detail'  (Bill Krohn, Cahiers du Cinéma). His recent writing includes a chapter on Topaz and (the script of) The Short Night in Hitchcock and the Cold War (Pace University Press, 2018), a chapter on Alfred Hitchcock Presents in Children, Youth, and American Television (Routledge, 2018), a chapter on "Hitchcock's Literary Influences" for A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock(Wiley Blackwell 2011, pb 2014), and an essay on "The Cutting Room" in 39 Steps to the Genius of Alfred Hitchcock (BFI, 2012). Ken has also written "Psycho Considerations" (2020), on the hitchcockmaster website if you click here.     

Ken Mogg's email address is muffin@labyrinth.net.au.

CINEMA REBORN - Countdown - Opening Film - David Hare writes on DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (George Marshall, USA, 1939) - Thursday 29 April at 6.30 pm

These notes also appear on the CINEMA REBORN WEBSITE 

BOOKINGS ON THE RANDWICK RITZ WEBSITE

George Marshall was born December 29, 1891 in Chicago and died February 17 1975 in Los Angeles.  His may not be a household name in auteurist circles these days but he landed in Hollywood close to the dawn of cinema, and made his first one reel short, Across the Rio Grandein 1916. His beginnings in the movies are almost accidental, like a number of other men (and a few women) who drifted into the business during and after The Great War with seemingly nowhere else to go.

 

George Marshall (left)

Marshall’s career then took a not atypical course for those directors whose careers ran parallel with the growth of the burgeoning studio system, and after beginning with one and two reel independent comedy shorts, he drifted into the best of the comedy production outfits, the Hal Roach studio where he honed his directorial skills with Laurel and Hardy and Fatty Arbuckle movies. Over the next few decades he shifted across the studio system from Fox to Universal to Paramount and then back again. His work, like so many journeyman directors itself covers and even defines a representative spectrum of genre based American cinema. To me his specialities were two (of the three) greatest American modes, the western and comedy. His early training in shorts and then feature length action pictures gave him a mastery of control and high-precision script-shaping to concentrate and expand the narrative to pace and stage the material to maximum dramatic effect. Among his very best films are also some of the best pictures of their respective genres. 

Destry Rides Again is one of the earliest major American western feature films. The Ghost Breakers, made when he moved to Paramount the following year in 1940, is the best Bob Hope comedy, with support from Paulette Godard and may be his most entertaining film. Its appeal as pure entertainment is mysteriously timeless.  His post-war 1946 The Blue Dahlia again at Paramount is the best of the Alan Ladd Noirs.  By the time his career was winding up in the mid sixties he was hooked into the big 1962 Cinerama project, How the West was Wonwhich would be the first feature film made in that cumbersome ultra-widescreen three camera process. Henry Hathaway and Ford were the other directors in the holy trinity, with Hathaway as wrangler for the project. Ford directed the two sublime Civil War sequences, and Marshall had been assigned to the “Railway” segment as the picture’s big action specialist. The rumour mill has it that by now Marshall was unwell for much of the shooting and, like Ford, he completely loathed the three camera process with its limitations of fixed focal lenses and technical intricacies which created ludicrous limitations on staging and blocking of the actors. In any case Hathaway ended up directing most if not all of Marshall’s assigned material but generously left him the screen credit. 

Destry Rides Again made in early 1939 was a project from producer Joe Pasternak, one of the great Hollywood “system” producers with a hard eye for talent and innovation.  The screenplay was heavily adapted from a Max Brand novel and with it Pasternak intended to rescue Marlene Dietrich from the obscurity of the “Box Office Poison” status she had labored under after her last two Paramount films with Sternberg in 1934 and 35. It’s one of several films that seals Marshall’s reputation as a key director of the reborn western and a master of narrative control and precision, especially here in Destry in balancing the limited doses of light hearted self parody of old Western stereotypes with quite sudden turns to deadly serious dramatic intentions.   The film’s relentless juggling of tone is almost shocking now to modern audiences who are more accustomed to the one dimensional mood plays of so many contemporary movies.  

Thus a convergence of high period Studio system talent, notably Pasternak as producer, Marshall as master director of multiple genres (including the musical numbers composed by Friedrich Hollaender for Dietrich in the picture) and the sheer tonal sophistication of the screenplay mark Destry as a both an innovator and a “classic” 

To understand Marshall further I think is to understand Destry itself, and its place in the magic firmament year of 1939, so beloved of cinephiles. This was the year the Depression was well and truly over, the “Big Four” studios (Paramount, Fox, Warners and MGM) had all pulled back from bankruptcy and technically the talking picture was at its technical and artistic peak. Among the cinephile games to play is the dreaded “1939 lists”so here goes. Internationally 1939 yielded Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu, Mizoguchi’s Zangiku Monogatari/Tale of the Last Chrysanthemum, Korda’s The Four Feathers, Carne’s Quai des Brumes, Ophuls’ Sans Lendemainand Duvivier’s La Fin du Jour.   In the USA the list is seemingly endless and includes Ford’s Stagecoach, Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, Cukor’s Zaza, Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, Leisen’s (sublime) Midnight, McCarey’s Love Affair, Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties and Marshall’s Destry Rides Again. 

So the year 1939 itself has much to do with what makes Destry a landmark picture in the Hollywood studio system. Prior to 1939, the western had been jointly invented by the Americans and the French, the latter in great part by the surrealist filmmaker Jean Durand in the first decades of the 20th century.  After the arrival of the early sound film, notwithstanding Raoul Walsh’s fascinating early widescreen talkie for Fox in 1930, The Big Trail, the genre fell out of favour for a variety of reasons, and ended up relegated usually to the “B” units of mostly second string studios who churned them out, serial-style for filler.  During the decade it remained for King Vidor, with The Texas Rangers in 1936, and de Mille with The Plainsman from the same year to take the genre seriously enough to reboot it, giving their movies leading actor casts and crews, including Fred MacMurray and Jack Oakie for Vidor, and Gary Cooper with Jean Arthur for de Mille. 

Both these movies re-opened the door to the western as a major American genre. And so it was in 1939 that two major directors made two key westerns which altered the direction of both their own careers and the future of the genre itself. Ford, first with his staggering, metaphysical morality play made in homage to Murnau, Stagecoach which finally revealed John Wayne as a star performer, and Marshall’s Destry Rides Again which not only re-established the immense range and appeal of the form, but also broke Dietrich’s deadly ”Box Office Poison” curse.  Destry, like Stagecoach was so commercially successful it broke BO records for Universal that year, and catapulted Dietrich back into the Hollywood system.

Watching it today in this gorgeous 35mm to 4K restoration from Universal, I hope you find Destry Rides Again as irresistible an entertainment as I do. 

Thoughts on Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO (USA, 1958) - Lifelong scholar of Hitchcock's work Ken Mogg presents some new thoughts on a masterpiece

Vertigo considerations

 

Thrasymachus To sum up, what shall I be after my death? Be clear and precise!

Philalethes Everything and nothing.

Thrasymachus As I expected! For the solution to a problem - a contradiction. That trick is very worn-out.

Philalethes To answer transcendent questions in language made for immanent knowledge is bound to lead to contradictions.

 

- Arthur Schopenhauer, "The Indestructibility of Being" 

 

 

'The metaphysical implications of the story … were more in Hitchcock's mind than in Coppel's treatment … So I rewrote the screenplay completely.'

      

- Samuel Taylor, quoted in Donald Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock

 

 

'Perhaps I need to be frightened … to teach me to despise my petty existence …'.

 

- Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac, The Living and the Dead

I'LL START WITH AN aside. Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) has a tenuous Australian connection: after Maxwell Anderson and Angus MacPhail had submitted initial treatments, Hitchcock hired the Australian-born novelist and playwright Alec Coppel - he had attended Wesley College, Melbourne - to further shape a screen adaptation of Boileau and Narcejac's 1954 mystery-shocker D'Entre les Morts, destined to become Vertigo. Soon Coppel was given the go-ahead to write a full screenplay which, however, was not well-received by Hitchcock. Reports differ on just why. Whereas Donald Spoto in his Hitchcock biography is condemnatory of Coppel's efforts ('the results were soon perceived as woefully disappointing … unshootable …'), Patrick McGilligan is less harsh ('Coppel was improving on Maxwell Anderson's spadework, especially when it came to the love story … Hitchcock and Coppel parted friends'). McGilligan notes that in fact Coppel visualised one of the film's most famous scenes: Scottie (James Stewart) kissing Judy (Kim Novak) in her hotel room, 'a kiss that plunges him back in time to the moment when he [had kissed her] in the stables of San Juan Bautista' where she had been impersonating the mysterious Madeleine.

 

That elaborate shot, involving a revolving turntable combined with back-projection and a difficult track (giving the effect of a 360° circling movement) has been aptly called 'Pirandellian' - after the Italian playwright and poet Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) whose recurrent subject was the fluid nature of identity. With its hurdy-gurdy accompaniment, the shot can be interpreted in both a 'vulgar' way (sexual consummation) and in a more profound way, apposite to Scottie's sense of having entered into Madeleine's secret (what used to be called the world-riddle, the secret of all space and time). This shot, at least as much as the equally famous (and again subjective) 'dizzying' shot inside the church tower (involving a simultaneous track-in and zoom-out), is the epitome of Vertigo's technical and metaphysical suggestiveness. For what it's worth, the Boileau/Narcejac novel goes out of its way to allude at one point to the mystic Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) who claimed to have rediscovered the dialectical principle that 'in Yes and No all things consist'. Boehme taught that God is 'the abyss, the nothing and the all'. Accordingly, by entering a state of total surrender, Man may know God.¹

Ambivalence

For a fleeting time, Scottie feels exultant, telling Judy, 'These are the first happy moments I've known in years.' The abyss, over which he had hung suspended at the start of the film, seems dispelled. Cinematography, musical score, and performances all combine to signal an upbeat, carefree mood. One sunny morning, the pair stroll beside a lake in Golden Gate Park and pause at the so-called 'Portals of the Past', a memorial to the earthquake that devastated San Francisco in 1906. How well Hitchcock employs that city's iconography in Vertigo! We cannot forget that San Francisco's 'gay old bohemian days' came to a sudden end, and that the city - which originally grew around the site of the Mission Dolores which Scottie visits early in the film - had to start over. The Mission Dolores itself was unscathed by the earthquake. For Scottie, that long-ago era represents an 'excitement' and a 'freedom' he thought he had lost, along with his virility, and which he now feels is returning to him. Love is very much the up-side of this film: Judy had fallen in love with Scottie even when, as Madeleine, she was deceiving him as part of the monstrous Gavin Elster's plan to make Scottie think he had seen Madeleine commit suicide. Not yet aware of the deception, Scottie believes Judy can offer him his 'second chance' of happiness.²For her part, such is her love, she allows herself to 'walk into danger'.

 

 

 

Scottie in (approximately) the second half of the film shows himself to be a man possessed, intent on re-creating in Judy his lost Madeleine, and therefore is far from exemplifying 'a state of total surrender'. At no point do we feel that Scottie has known God! On the contrary, in his pursuit of the secret that he senses in Madeleine, he visits missions and art galleries but seems not the slightest bit interested in their 'content'. (At the Mission Dolores he simply follows Madeleine in one door and out the other - no genuflecting at the alter for him, although he does take off his hat; similarly, at the Palace of the Legion of Honour art gallery, he shows little interest in studying the gallery's paintings - except one, 'Portrait of Carlotta', at which a rapt Madeleine gazes. Incidentally, there's a near-variant on these moments in the art gallery scene in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, 1966.) Fortuitously or not, the metaphysical truths of Vertigo emerge seamlessly from the drama. There are several more. At every turn - and Vertigo has many of those! - there is ambivalence, as in a tension between worldly and spiritual. It might be described as a necessary coming to terms with the hollowness of most ambition, albeit ambition is often what motivates people in the first place. Perhaps the most likeable person in Vertigo is Scottie's friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), but who exemplifies the film's 'failed artists'. (Scottie is another such.  In the novel, after Madeleine's apparent suicide, Scottie chastises himself for being someone too self-preoccupied: 'Gévigne had chosen the wrong man for the job …  He should have chosen someone very charming, brilliant - an artist perhaps …'.) Scottie reprimands Midge for 'wasting [her] time in the underwear department', for being content to expend her talent on commercial art. His own ambition, which she notes, had turned him from being simply 'the bright young lawyer' towards joining the police force, hoping one day to become chief-of-police. However, his guilt over a colleague's death has compelled him to quit. As for Judy, a country girl from Salina, Kansas, she had moved to the big city, presumably hoping for a lucky break, perhaps marriage to a wealthy husband. It hasn't happened. Only the film's villain, Gavin (Tom Helmore, who had appeared in two Hitchcock silent films), has 'made it', and that by means of a loveless marriage that has seen him 'marrying into the shipbuilding business'. Hoping to gain quick access to the proceeds of his ambition, he comes up with his ingenious plan to murder his wife, using Scottie as dupe. Altogether, the ambivalence of Vertigo might be said to indirectly invoke the 'ninth beatitude' coined by poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), 'Blessed is he who expects nothing' - by showing the double-mindedness of the majority of people who, all their adult lives, are looking out for the main chance - or, figuratively, their second chance! In non-highfalutin terms, this is the stuff of very human drama.

Audacity

   

Not only Gavin's plan is ingenious. So, too, is Hitchcock's film. Actually, the word I would apply to both is 'audacious'. Once you look past the - in every sense - sheer beauty of Vertigo, you see how much it relies on the outlandish Boileau/Narcejac plot and, in turn, on Elster's audaciously-conceived - and implausible - murder plan! Hitchcock saw Vertigo as his opportunity to make his own film of a Boileau & Narcejac novel, as French director Henri-Georges Clouzot had already done with Diabolique (1955). My dictionary defines audacious as 'daring' or 'bold' or 'impudent' - I would apply them all to Vertigo! My point is, the film needs to be appreciated for that quality, perhaps its most outstanding one. It clearly shows Hitchcock's confidence to lead the audience where the plot needs to go, without alienating them and maintaining their interest at every turn. Now ask yourself this. How long had the evil Gavin been planning his audacious murder scheme with its backstory about Madeleine's ancestor Carlotta Valdes, designed to fool Scottie into his unwitting participation? Presumably the answer is: ever since Scottie and those who knew him had learned that he suffered from acrophobia - fear of heights - when a police colleague had fallen to his death. Yet while Gavin may have had a 'eureka!' moment here, the broad idea could have been gestating from the time he married. Moreover, there would have been multiple details to be worked out. Like, getting the complicity of Judy, his mistress at the time. (Surely he didn't seduce her just so that he could use her in his plan?) Also, there would have been others whose co-operation he needed, notably the landlady (Ellen Corby) at the McKittrick Hotel, where the suicidal Carlotta Valdes had once lived. How had Gavin known that a room for Judy/Madeleine to 'sit' (the landlady's word, with its connotation of an artist's model) had become vacant, or would soon do so? And again, presumably the landlady's preparedness to lie to Scottie, an ex-detective, would have required a hefty bribe? Incidentally, it was doubtless fortuitous - and therefore not exactly audacious on Hitchcock's part - that a long-time favourite novel of his, namely, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), had provided him with an excellent rationale to make Vertigo. At one point in Wilde's novel, someone says of San Francisco, 'It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world … every one who disappears is said to be seen [there] …’!

 

Madeleine is forever appearing and disappearing, whether around corners or behind a tree trunk (in Muir Woods) or at doorways, such as that in Scottie's apartment when she emerges from his bedroom. These moments are also rhymed more specifically, as when Judy in her hotel emerges from herbedroom after disappearing inside to put on Madeleine's clothes that Scottie has bought for her. (Soon afterwards, she asks anxiously, 'Oh Scottie, I do have you now, don't I?') But this example may also draw attention to other splendid instances of Hitchcock's production design and direction. I'm thinking now of how people walkin Vertigo.  Gavin at his club tells Scottie that when Madeleine has one of her trances 'she even walks in a different way' - and it's true! Gait, vocal inflections, facial flicker, are all marvellously modulated in this film - congratulations must go to the actors, especially Kim Novak - and overseen brilliantly by Hitchcock who misses no nuance while at the same time ensuring that nothing is superfluous. In Robert J. Yanal's book Hitchcock as Philosopher (2005) a production still shows Hitchcock directing the group of actors who play the shopgirls seen by Scottie in the street when he first spots Judy and her resemblance to his lost Madeleine. The caption specifies that this is Hitchcock on location in San Francisco, demonstrating to Novak 'and several bit players the walk he wants'. Just that, nothing else!

 

 

Further, how people walk and talk in films can characterise them, often subtly. In a Jungian sense, Madeleine in Vertigo is an Eternal Feminine figure, i.e., an archetype created by men, no doubt wishfully. Accordingly, Scottie seems to load Madeleine with qualities that even he doesn't wholly grasp, and whose allure draws him on. Hitchcock once said that he dressed Madeleine in grey to suggest that she had just materialised from the San Francisco fog (and might be swallowed up by it again). Which figures! The content of Vertigo is over-determined. One of the forerunners of the Vertigo story has to be Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva, A Pompeian Fantasy (1903) which was inspired by the ancient bas-relief showing three women walking (Gradiva's name means 'the woman who walks') and whose association with Pompeii in Jensen's novella seems highly apposite to earthquake-prone San Francisco in Hitchcock's film. The young archaeologist in Gradiva, one Norbert Hanold, becomes obsessed by the woman in the bas-relief. One day, visiting the ruins of Pompeii, the woman materialises before him, whereupon he follows her, unsure whether he is dreaming. No doubt Boileau and Narcejac were familiar with Gradiva, if only by reputation: Sigmund Freud had analysed the story in his "Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva" (1906). (For another antecedent of the Vertigo story, see the 1892 Symbolist novel Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach, about a dead woman lost and found again in her double. Inter alia, it depicts the bridges and canals of Bruges in Belgium in an evocative manner akin to Hitchcock's deployment of the sights and streets of San Francisco.)

  

Aspects (multiple)

Kim Novak's great performance in Vertigo is up to the requirements of every twist and turn of the story. Vertigo is a film about performances, after all, with the wily Gavin as producer/director. Again it is audacious of the film to suppose that Judy could actually have played Madeleine - that is one of the film's Pirandellian conceits. Take it or leave it, Hitchcock seems to assert, almost loftily, while he unfolds the narrative in such a hypnotic way that his challenge may pass unnoticed. I haven't yet specifically praised the sheer vocal versatility of both main actors. But think of how Novak gives Madeleine a calm, measured and infinitely 'feminine' vocal tone; whereas, as Judy, her voice takes on a high, often clipped and even whiny note befitting a 'common' shopgirl who tells Scottie that she has been 'knowing' since she was 17. (It's worth fast-forwarding the film on Blu-ray or DVD between an early scene and a later one to readily appreciate the differences.) Similarly, in early scenes Stewart as Scottie is understandably subdued after losing his police colleague (though Midge tries to perk him up), then is rapidly taken out of himself by the enigma of Madeleine, then becomes near-catatonic after Madeleine's death; next, on meeting Judy, he briefly regains his accustomed self ('the first happy moments I've known in years'), then suddenly - when he realises that he was set-up (as a 'made-to-order witness') - his voice and manner become steely and/or peremptory and stay that way until he forces Judy to ascend the belltower for the last time. Here note the contrast between the grimly resolute Scottie and the increasingly fearful and resistant Judy. Incidentally, I would contest Robert Yanal's characterisation of Scottie in the first half of the film: 'Scottie's police instincts should have allowed him to see through the illusion of [Madeleine] … but he willingly suspends his disbelief …'.  In fact, his resistance is palpable, and he keeps telling Madeleine that she has simply forgotten places she had seen when she was a little girl. 'You see, there's an explanation for everything!' he says, trying desperately to perform his expected role of, in Gavin's phrase, 'the hard-headed Scot'. Still, admittedly it's not that simple! The audience, like Scottie, is torn between rationality and succumbing to the mysterioso of Madeleine, and part of us hopes that somehow Scottie has missed something! Again this is the stuff of very human drama, or anyway the power of film.

  

As Scottie tells Madeleine early in the novel, 'You frighten me, but I need you. Perhaps I need to be frightened …'. (Hitchcock once said of his films, 'They give the audience good healthy mental shake-ups!') Fascinatingly, Maurice Nadeau in his History of Surrealism (English edition 1965) reminds us that the woman named Gradiva was the muse of the Surrealists. And again it figures! Scottie, like most people, needs to be taken out of himself, and shown that his 'petty existence', which is bound in subjectivity, is not all there is! Yanal's chapter on Vertigo at times leaves me in two minds. For example, it claims that Vertigois 'a masterpiece of cinematic tragedy' - I've no quarrel with that - yet it spends inordinate space (several pages) on some rather forced comparisons likening Scottie and Judy's story to that of Tristan and Iseult (Isolt, Isolde). Equally, I think Yanal is right to say as follows: 'A musical resemblance between Vertigo and [Wagner's] Tristan… ought not to be pushed too far. … [Bernard] Herrmann's score sometimes sounds like Wagner, but it also sometimes sounds like Tchaikovsky, sometimes like Dukas, and so on.' Thus, after overly narrowing down the focus of our Vertigo appreciation, Yanal does open it up again! Unfortunately, he condescends to say that Hitchcock's masterpiece stems from 'a piece of French pulp fiction'. Well, I happen to agree with my friend Freda Freiberg that D'Entre les Morts is a fine piece of sustained writing: in their dry, passionless style, two co-masters of a particular genre - call it 'the mystery-grotesque' - Boileau and Narcejac, have given Hitchcock much of the raw material of his film. That in itself is no mean feat. For example, the film's Muir Woods scene, with its ancient Sequoias, is a conflation of the novel's passing reference to the Forêt de Fontainebleau and a scene in the Louvre ('Soon they were sauntering among Egyptian gods in the coolness of a cathedral'). And again, Yanal suggests that Scottie's vertigo (and thus presumably the film's title) 'is a bit of a MacGuffin'. Surely that's inadequate? For one thing, Scottie's acrophobia obviously relates to his glimpse of 'the abyss' at the film's outset which haunts him thereafter - and arguably gives him a privileged perspective on our 'petty existence'. For another thing, nobody ever said that solving the world-riddle is easy! Solving, or even grasping, the world-riddle has exercised the best minds for more than 100 years: the term was coined by Friedrich Nietzsche, and is indeed a head-spinner! Not incidentally, note that the figurative first shot of the film is the close-up of a hand grasping as if for dear life onto a horizontal bar - something to hold onto - which proves to be the rung of a metal ladder leading to a rooftop high above the city.  

 

Another friend of mine, the late Richard Franklin (director of Psycho II), once enthused to me about all the small but masterly details that contribute to the texture of Vertigo. I recall his even pointing out that the decorative pattern on cups and saucers in Scottie's apartment is one of concentric circles! Or think of the glass pendants on the table-lamps when Scottie is dining out with Judy, recalling other suspended objects throughout the film, notably the magnificent chandelier over the stairs of the McKittrick Hotel. On inspection, the chandelier is made up of numerous glass pendants. Of course, a key motif of Vertigo is its tunnel imagery. Again and again, we see characters push into darkness, beginning with Scottie's entry to Podesta's flower shop, full of colourful flowers and bouquets, via an unused storeroom behind it. Such imagery culminates with Scottie and Judy's final trip to the fateful tower of the Mission San Juan Bautista, during which a tunnel of overarching Eucalypts speeds past. Hitchcock films it all subjectively, through the car windscreen. Madeleine's dream of walking down a long corridor will soon prove premonitory: 'I know that when I walk into the darkness [for the last time] that I'll die.' As Robin Wood notes, the view looking down from inside the tower is itself like a dark tunnel-image.

Into the dark …

To conclude these brief notes on Vertigo I'll mention other ways in which the final scene is so fitting. When the nun says, 'I heard voices … God have mercy!', her words, like an epigraph, could in fact apply to any of the characters, even the undeserving Gavin! Those characters will soon enough become simply 'the small stuff of history', to use Scottie's evocative phrase just before Midge introduces him to Pop Liebel, proprietor of the Argosy Bookshop. Vertigo goes out of its way to serve us notice of the characters' mortality, as in the Muir Woods scene. (Note: even one of the 'ever-living' trees has been felled.) The hypnotic San Francisco street scenes are paradoxical: absolutely substantial in one way, moodily 'phantasmagorical' in another. Briefly, the various characters pass across the screen: they're effectively just voices heard in the city's fog, or analogous to the fleeing felon on the rooftop at the start whom we never see again. Even Pop Liebel of phenomenal memory is starting to forget details of the 'juicy' stories of old-time San Francisco that he once knew perfectly. (As Pop talks to Midge and Scottie, the shop imperceptibly darkens. Similarly, Midge is last seen walking slowly away down a corridor that darkens around her.) As for Scottie, after he loses Judy when she steps back into space, startled by the black-garbed nun - one more 'apparition' - you can't say that his future isn't dark, notwithstanding that he still has Midge with whom to share a beer and to converse.  

 

When you think about it, it's fitting that a stern old nun becomes the deus ex machina with which to resolve the film's story - given that the film's subject-matter, indeed its very title, may refer to 'everything and nothing', the world-riddle! Any other resolution might be inadequate, failing to acknowledge that the riddle can't be solved in everyday terms! (Recall that Scottie had his own 'solution' when first confronted with Madeleine's story and background. Brandishing his drink, he had exclaimed, 'Boy! I need this!') The nun is suitably other-worldly; at the same time, her demeanour suggests that she has encountered human folly before now. As she tolls the mission bell, it gives small comfort, on a worldly plane, to the defeated Scottie who stands bereft, looking down. Hitchcock has suggested that Scottie may possibly throw himself after Judy, bringing the film full-circle from his narrow escape on the rooftop at the start. ³

 

Notes

 

1.  This essay argues that the viewer of Vertigo is vouchsafed such knowledge!

 

2.  The potent theme of 'the second chance' informs other Hitchcock films such as Spellbound (1945). I recall that Donald Spoto has noted that the theme is widespread in literature. Hitchcock's admirers among the French critics (e.g., Jean Douchet) linked it to the notion of Original Sin.

 

3.  The most substantial general essays in English on Vertigo may be the chapter in Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films Revisited (Revised Edition, 1989) and Donald Spoto's chapter in his The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (Second Edition, 1992). But there are countless articles and monographs out there.  The present essay has simply tried to add a few salient points to the mix, hopefully one or two of them original.

 

About the author

Ken Mogg has published widely on Hitchcock; his The Alfred Hitchcock Story(1999, revised 2008) covers every film 'in loving detail'  (Bill Krohn, Cahiers du Cinéma). His recent writing includes a chapter on Topaz and (the script of) The Short Night in Hitchcock and the Cold War ((Pace University Press, 2018), a chapter on Alfred Hitchcock Presents in Children, Youth, and American Television (Routledge, 2018), a chapter on "Hitchcock's Literary Influences" for A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock(Wiley Blackwell 2011, pb 2014), and an essay on "The Cutting Room" in 39 Steps to the Genius of Alfred Hitchcock (BFI, 2012). There's a companion piece to the present essay, "Psycho Considerations" (2020), on the hitchcockmaster website if you click here.    

Ken Mogg's email address is muffin@labyrinth.net.au.