name	Vertigo
director	Alfred Hitchcock
producer	Alfred Hitchcock
writer	Alec CoppelSamuel A. Taylor
story	Pierre BoileauThomas Narcejac
starring	James StewartKim NovakBarbara Bel Geddes
music	Bernard Herrmann
cinematography	Robert Burks
editing	George Tomasini
distributor	Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures (1983-present)
released
runtime	128 minutes
country
language	English
budget	$2,479,000
gross	$7,311,013 }}

''Vertigo'' is a 1958 psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Barbara Bel Geddes. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor, based on the 1954 novel ''D'entre les morts'' by Boileau-Narcejac.

It is the story of a retired police detective suffering from acrophobia who is hired as a private investigator to follow the wife of an acquaintance to uncover the mystery of her peculiar behavior.

The film received mixed reviews upon initial release, but has garnered acclaim since and is now frequently ranked among the greatest films ever made, and often cited as a classic Hitchcock film and one of the defining works of his career.

Plot

After an incident where his until-then latent acrophobia results in the horrific death of a fellow officer (Fred Graham), detective John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) retires from police work, spending much of his time with his artist friend and ex-fiancee Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes). Scottie tries to gradually conquer his fears, however, Midge mentions that it might be impossible to conquer it and that another severe emotional shock might be the only cure.

An old acquaintance named Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) asks Scottie to tail his wife, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), who claims that she has been possessed by a dead woman. Reluctantly, Scottie agrees. The next day, Madeleine (with Scottie following) first goes to a florist in the Financial District, where she buys a bouquet of flowers; next, she visits the grave of Carlotta Valdes at the Mission Dolores cemetery; she then visits an art museum, where she sits watching a portrait of a woman much resembling her. Scottie learns that the painting is called ''Portrait of Carlotta.'' Lastly, she enters an old house (the McKittrick Hotel) in the city's Western Addition and sits in an upstairs room. However, when Scottie goes in to investigate, he finds that she and her car have gone and the desk clerk-owner (Ellen Corby) insisted that she had not even entered the hotel at all.

Midge takes Scottie to an expert on local history, who informs them that Carlotta Valdes had a tragic life that ended in suicide. After visiting back with Elster, Scottie learns that Carlotta was Madeleine's great-grandmother, and that she is the woman that he fears is possessing Madeleine. However, Elster tells Scottie that Madeleine has no knowledge of who her grandmother was.

Scottie tails Madeleine to Fort Point, where she suddenly leaps into San Francisco Bay directly under the Golden Gate Bridge. Scottie quickly rescues her and takes Madeleine to his home to recover. The meeting is tense and leads to a strange intimacy between them. But after receiving a phone call, Madeleine suddenly disappears and drives away.

The next day, Scottie follows her again, back to his own house, where the two confront one another and decide to spend the day together due to Scottie's fear that Madeleine might commit suicide. The two travel to Muir Woods. Scottie ultimately confronts her and Madeleine eventually confesses that she feels like she may be going insane. She runs to the ocean and the two passionately kiss. Later, upon hearing her recount the details of a nightmare, Scottie identifies the setting as Mission San Juan Bautista and takes Madeleine there in an effort to ease her anxiety, while at the same time, proclaiming his love to her. At the mission, Madeleine panics and suddenly runs into the mission's church and up into the bell tower. Scottie chases after her, but his acrophobia prevents him from overtaking her. Halted on the steps by vertigo and paralyzing fear, Scottie watches as Madeleine plunges past a window and lands on the roof below.

An inquest is held and the manner of her death is officially declared to be suicide. Scottie is shamed by the suggestion of the judge that his weakness has rendered him incapable of preventing someone's death. Gavin Elster does not hold him at fault, blaming his wife's fate on possession by Carlotta Valdes. Nonetheless, in the following weeks Scottie becomes severely depressed.

He is treated in a sanitarium, where he falls silent and is haunted by vivid nightmares. Although Midge often visits him, his condition remains the same. During the day, Scottie haunts the places that Madeleine had visited, often imagining that he sees her.One day, he spots a young woman who somehow reminds him of Madeleine. Scottie follows the woman to her hotel room. She identifies herself as Judy Barton, a simple girl from Kansas, and even shows him identification to prove it. Though initially suspicious and defensive, Judy eventually agrees to join Scottie for dinner.

As soon as Scottie leaves, however, Judy has a flashback that reveals that she was, in fact, the woman known as "Madeleine," but she was not actually Gavin's wife. Judy writes in a confession letter to Scottie how she was the accomplice to the real Madeleine Elster's murder by Gavin, and how Gavin had taken advantage of Scottie due to his acrophobia. She rips up the letter, however, and decides to continue the charade because she truly was in love with Scottie.

Still, Scottie remains obsessed by his memory of "Madeleine" and their similarities. He transforms Judy's hair and clothing until she once more resembles Madeleine. Judy goes along with these dramatic changes on the chance that she and Scottie may finally find happiness together. But just when she becomes all but perfect in his eye, Scottie realizes the truth occurs when Judy wears a unique necklace that he remembers seeing in the portrait of Carlotta Valdes. Instead of dinner, Scottie insists on taking Judy to the Mission San Juan Bautista.

There, he reveals that he wants to reenact the event that led to his madness, admitting that he now knows Madeleine and Judy are the same. Scottie forces her up the bell tower and angrily presses Judy to admit her deceit. Scottie reaches the top, conquering his acrophobia at last. Judy confesses that Gavin had hired her to pose as Madeleine and pretend to be possessed; the suicide was faked by hiding at the top of the bell tower while Elster tossed the body of his already-murdered wife. Gavin was able to use Scottie as a witness to her apparent suicide by correctly predicting that his acrophobia would prevent him from following "Madeleine" to the top of the tower.

Judy pleads to Scottie to forgive her because she truly loves him. The two embrace. Then suddenly a nun emerges from the trapdoor and Judy steps backward, falling from the tower to her death. The film ends with Scottie perched on a narrow ledge in the same pose from one of his nightmares, while the nun rings the mission bell.

Cast

James Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson

Kim Novak as Judy Barton/Madeleine Elster

Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge Wood

Tom Helmore as Gavin Elster

Fred Graham as Scottie's police partner

Raymond Bailey as Scottie's doctor

Henry Jones as the Coroner

Ellen Corby as the hotel owner

Adaptation

The screenplay is an adaptation of the French novel ''The Living and the Dead'' (''D'entre les morts'') by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Hitchcock had previously tried to buy the rights to the same authors' previous novel, ''Celle qui n'était plus'', but he failed, and it was made instead by Henri-Georges Clouzot as ''Les Diaboliques''. Although François Truffaut once suggested that ''D'Entre les morts'' was specifically written for Hitchcock by Boileau and Narcejac, Narcejac subsequently denied that this was their intention. However, Hitchcock's interest in their work meant that Paramount Pictures commissioned a synopsis of ''D'Entre les morts'' in 1954, before it had even been translated into English.

Hitchcock originally hired playwright Maxwell Anderson to write a screenplay, but rejected his work, which was entitled ''Darkling I Listen''. The final script was written by Samuel A. Taylor — who was recommended to Hitchcock due to his knowledge of San Francisco — from notes by Hitchcock. Among Taylor's creations was the character of Midge. Taylor attempted to take sole credit for the screenplay, but Alec Coppel — the other screenplay writer hired by Hitchcock — protested to the Screen Writers Guild, which determined that both writers were entitled to a credit.

When actress Vera Miles, who was under personal contract to Hitchcock and had appeared on both his television show and in his film ''The Wrong Man'', could not act in ''Vertigo'' owing to her pregnancy, the director declined to postpone shooting and cast Kim Novak as the female lead. Ironically, by the time Novak had tied up prior film commitments and a vacation promised by Columbia Pictures, the studio that held her contract, Miles had given birth and was available for the film. Hitchcock proceeded with Novak, nevertheless. Columbia head Harry Cohn agreed to lend Novak to ''Vertigo'' if Stewart would agree to co-star with Novak in ''Bell, Book and Candle'', a Columbia production released in December 1958.

According to Herbert Coleman, ''Vertigo'''s associate producer and a frequent collaborator with Hitchcock, the director decided at the eleventh hour to remove Kim Novak's pivotal flashback sequence from the finished film, a significant re-edit which left the twist unrevealed until the very end. Hitchcock's decision was supported by Joan Harrison, another filmmaking associate, but eventually overturned by pressure from Paramount.

A coda to the film was shot that showed Midge and a more-or-less healed Scottie listening to a radio report (voiced by unseen San Francisco radio announcer Dave McElhatton) of Gavin Elster's capture in Europe. This ending was mandated by British censorship requirements (where the murderer could not be allowed to get away with his crime) and was not featured in the American cut of the film. It is included as an extra in the restored DVD release.

Musical score

The score was written by Bernard Herrmann. It was not conducted by him, but was conducted by Muir Mathieson and recorded in Europe, due to a musician's strike in the U.S.

In a 2004 special issue by ''Sight & Sound'' devoted to Film Music, Martin Scorsese described the qualities of Herrmann's famous score:

Hitchcock's film is about obsession, which means that it's about circling back to the same moment, again and again ... And the music is also built around spirals and circles, fulfilment and despair. Herrmann really understood what Hitchcock was going for — he wanted to penetrate to the heart of obsession.

Filming locations

Filmed from September to December 1957, ''Vertigo'' uses location footage of the San Francisco Bay Area, with its steep hills and tall, arching bridges. In the driving scenes shot in the city, the main characters' cars are almost always pictured heading ''down'' the city's steeply inclined streets. In October 1996, the restored print of ''Vertigo'' debuted at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco with a live on-stage introduction by surviving cast member Kim Novak, providing the city a chance to celebrate itself. Visiting the San Francisco film locations has something of a cult following as well as modest tourist appeal. Such a tour is featured in a subsection of Chris Marker's documentary montage ''Sans Soleil''.

Areas that were shot on location (not recreated in a studio):

The Mission San Juan Bautista, where Madeleine falls from the tower, is a real place, but the tower had to be matted in with a painting using studio effects; Hitchcock had first visited the mission before the tower was torn down due to dry rot, and was reportedly displeased to find it missing when he returned to film his scenes. The original tower was much smaller and less dramatic than the film's version.

The Carlotta Valdes headstone featured in the film (created by the props department) was left at Mission Dolores. Eventually, the headstone was removed as the mission considered it disrespectful to the dead to house a tourist attraction grave for a fictional person.

Madeleine jumps into the sea at Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

The gallery where Carlotta's painting appears is the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The Carlotta Valdes portrait was lost after being removed from the gallery, but many of the other paintings in the background of the portrait scenes are still on view.

Muir Woods National Monument is represented by Big Basin Redwoods State Park; however, the cutaway of the redwood tree showing its age is a replica of one that can still be found at Muir Woods. The coastal region where Scottie and Madeleine first kiss is Cypress Point, a location along the 17 Mile Drive near Pebble Beach. However, the lone tree by which they kiss is a prop brought specially to the location.

The domed building past which Scottie and Judy walk is the Palace of Fine Arts.

Coit Tower appears in many background shots; Hitchcock once said that he included it as a phallic symbol.

Gavin and Madeleine's apartment building is "The Brocklebank" at 1000 Mason Street, which still looks essentially the same. It is across the street from the Fairmont Hotel, where Hitchcock usually stayed when he visited and where many of the cast and crew stayed during filming.

The "McKittrick Hotel" was a privately-owned Victorian mansion from the 1880s at Gough and Eddy Streets. It was torn down in 1959 and is now an athletic practice field for Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory School. The St. Paulus Lutheran Church, seen across from the mansion, was destroyed in a fire years later.

Podesta Baldocchi is the flower shop Madeleine visits as she is being followed by Scottie. The shop's location at the time of filming was 224 Grant Avenue. The Podesta Baldocchi flower shop now does business from a location at 410 Harriet Street.

The Empire Hotel is a real place, called the York Hotel, and now (as of January 2009) the Hotel Vertigo at 940 Sutter Street. Judy's room was created, but the flashing green neon of the "Hotel Empire" sign outside is based on the actual hotel's sign (it was replaced when the hotel was re-named).

Ernie's Restaurant (847 Montgomery St.) was a real place in North Beach, not far from Scottie's apartment. It is no longer operating.

One short scene shows Union Square at dawn, with old-fashioned "semaphore" traffic lights. Pop Leibl's bookstore, the Argosy, was not a real location, but one recreated on the Paramount lot in imitation of the real-life Argonaut Book Store, which still exists near Sutter and Jones.

Reception

Contemporaneous reception

''Vertigo'' premiered in San Francisco on May 9, 1958 at the Stage Door Theater at Mason and Geary (now the Ruby Skye nightclub). Its performance at the box office was average, and reviews were mixed. ''Variety'' said the film showed Hitchcock's "mastery", but was too long and slow for "what is basically only a psychological murder mystery". Similarly, the ''Los Angeles Times'' admired the scenery, but found the plot "too long" and felt it "bogs down" in "a maze of detail"; scholar Dan Aulier says that this review "sounded the tone that most popular critics would take with the film". However, the ''Los Angeles Examiner'' loved it, admiring the "excitement, action, romance, glamor and [the] crazy, off-beat love story". As well, ''New York Times'' film critic Bosley Crowther also gave ''Vertigo'' a positive review by explaining that "[the] secret [of the film] is so clever, even though it is devilishly far-fetched."

Additional reasons for the mixed response initially were that Hitchcock fans were not pleased with his departure from the romantic-thriller territory of earlier films and that the mystery was solved with one-third of the film left to go.

In an interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock stated that ''Vertigo'' was one of his favorite films, with some reservations. Hitchcock blamed the film's failure on Stewart, at age 50, looking too old to play a convincing love interest for Kim Novak, who at 25 was half his age at the time.

Hitchcock and Stewart received the San Sebastián International Film Festival awards for Best Director and Best Actor respectively and the film was nominated for Academy Awards in two technical categories:, Best Art Direction - Black-and-White or Color (Hal Pereira, Henry Bumstead, Samuel M. Comer, Frank McKelvy) and Best Sound (George Dutton).

Re-evaluation

In the 1950s, the French ''Cahiers du cinéma'' critics began re-evaluating Hitchcock as a serious artist rather than just a populist showman. However, even François Truffaut's important 1962 interviews with Hitchcock (not published in English until 1967) mentions ''Vertigo'' only in passing. Dan Aulier has suggested that the real beginning of ''Vertigo''s rise in adulation was the British-Canadian scholar Robin Wood's ''Hitchcock's Films'' (1968), which calls the film "Hitchcock's masterpiece to date and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us". Adding to its mystique was the fact that ''Vertigo'' was one of five films owned by Hitchcock which was removed from circulation in 1973. When ''Vertigo'' was re-released in theaters in October 1983, and then on home video in October 1984, it achieved an impressive commercial success and laudatory reviews. Similarly adulatory reviews were written for the October 1996 showing of a restored print in 70mm and DTS sound at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.

In 1989, ''Vertigo'' was recognized as a "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" film by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in the first year of the registry's voting.

The film ranked 4th and 2nd respectively in ''Sight and Sound'' 1992 and 2002 critic polls of the best films ever made. In 2005, ''Vertigo'' came in second (to ''Goodfellas'') in British magazine ''Total Film'' book ''100 Greatest Movies of All Time''.

In his book ''Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer'', however, British film critic Tom Shone argued that ''Vertigo''s critical re-evaluation has led to excessive praise, and argued for a more measured response. Faulting ''Sight and Sound'' for "perennially" putting the film on the list of best-ever films, he wrote that "Hitchcock is a director who delights in getting his plot mechanisms buffed up to a nice humming shine, and so the ''Sight and Sound'' team praise the one film of his in which this is not the case – it's all loose ends and lopsided angles, its plumbing out on display for the critic to pick over at his leisure."

American Film Institute recognition

AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies #61

AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills #18

AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores #12

AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions #18

AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) #9

AFI's 10 Top 10 #1 Mystery

Home media

In 1996, director Harrison Engle produced a documentary about the making of Hitchcock's classic, ''Obsessed with Vertigo''. Narrated by Roddy McDowell, the film played on American Movie Classics, and has since been included with DVD versions of ''Vertigo''. Surviving members of the cast and crew participated, along with noted filmmaker Martin Scorsese and Alfred's daughter, Patricia Hitchcock. Engle first visited the ''Vertigo'' shooting locations in the summer of 1958, just months after completion of the film.

Restoration

In 1996, the film was given a lengthy and controversial restoration by Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz and re-released to theaters. The new print featured restored color and newly created audio, utilizing modern sound effects mixed in DTS digital surround sound. In October 1996, the restored ''Vertigo'' premiered at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, with Kim Novak and Patricia Hitchcock in person. At this screening, the film was exhibited for the first time in DTS and 70mm, a format with a similar frame size to the VistaVision system in which it was originally shot.

One bone of contention regarding the 1996 restoration was the decision to re-record the foley sound effects from scratch (to allow Dolby-quality mixing for surround sound and stereo). Harris and Katz wanted to stay as close as possible to the original: "It was our intent to re-mix the original music tracks with dialogue culled from the old mono and new Foley and effects tracks, which were to have been created following Mr. Hitchcock's original notes. That was the intent. It is not what occurred, the studio having made the decision to re-invent the track anew." Harris and Katz sometimes added extra sound effects to camouflage defects in the old soundtrack ("hisses, pops, and bangs"); in particular they added extra seagull cries and a foghorn to the scene at Cypress Point. The new mix has also been accused of putting too much emphasis on the score at the expense of the sound effects. The 2005 ''Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection'' DVD contains the original mono track as an option.

Significant color correction was necessary because of the fading of original negatives. In some cases a new negative was created from the silver separation masters, but in many instances this was impossible because of differential separation shrinkage, and because the 1958 separations were poorly made. Separations used three individual films: one for each of the primary colors. In the case of ''Vertigo'', these had shrunk in different and erratic proportions, making re-alignment impossible. As such, significant amounts of computer assisted coloration were necessary. Although the results are not noticeable on viewing the film, some elements were as many as eight generations away from the original negative.

When such large portions of re-creation become necessary, then the danger of artistic license by the restorers becomes an issue, and the restorers received some criticism for their re-creation of colors that allegedly did not honor the director and cinematographer's intentions. The restoration team argued that they did research on the colors used in the original locations, cars, wardrobe, and skin tones. One breakthrough moment came when the Ford Motor Company supplied a well-preserved green paint sample for a car used in the film. As the use of the color green in the film has artistic importance, matching a shade of green was a stroke of luck for restoration and provided a reference shade from which to work.

Legacy

The Brian De Palma films ''Body Double'' (1984) and ''Obsession'' (1976) are heavily influenced by ''Vertigo''.

Mel Brooks parodied ''Vertigo'' and other Hitchcock films in the movie ''High Anxiety'' (1977).

The San Francisco Bay Area-based band Faith No More framed their video for the song "Last Cup of Sorrow" (1997) as an homage to ''Vertigo'', with lead singer Mike Patton in the Jimmy Stewart role, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Kim Novak's character.

The ''That 70's Show'' episode "Too Old to Trick or Treat, Too Young to Die" (originally aired October 31, 2000) parodies several Hitchcock films, including ''Vertigo''. The film has also been parodied on ''The Simpsons''.

''Vertigo'' is one of the many Hitchcock films represented in the ''Psych'' episode "Mr. Yin Presents...". The character of Juliette is represented as Madeleine from the film.

In the ''Pushing Daisies'' episode "Bitches" (2007), Emerson Cod experiences an epiphany in a nightmare very similar to Scotty's nightmare in ''Vertigo''. The episode "Bad Habits" also contained visual references to ''Vertigo'', including a murder mystery in which the victim was pushed from a bell tower.

See also

Vertigo effect

Alfred Hitchcock filmography

1958 in film

Cinema of the United States

List of American films of 1958

Films considered the greatest ever

Notes

External links

Restoration

A Very Different "Slice of Cake:" Restoring Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

A Swimming in the Head Detailed critique of the 1996 restoration

Images

''Vertigo'': Then & Now Before and after images of San Francisco locations seen in the film

''Vertigo'' Screenshot Gallery at Alfred Hitchcock Fans Online

Category:1958 films Category:American films Category:English-language films Category:1950s romance films Category:Color film noir Category:Detective films Category:Films about suicide Category:Films based on mystery novels Category:Films directed by Alfred Hitchcock Category:Films set in San Francisco, California Category:Films shot in VistaVision Category:American mystery films Category:Paramount Pictures films Category:Psychological thriller films Category:United States National Film Registry films Category:Screenplays by Samuel A. Taylor

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